8;< 

XX 



LECTURES ON PREACHING. 

Delivered before the Divinity School of Yale College in January 

and February, 1877. 

By the Rev. PHILLIPS BROOKS. 

Fifth Thousand. i2mo., 2S1 pages . . . $/.jo. 



" Unlike Robertson, Phillips Brooks continually reminds us of him. He has the same 
analytical power ; the same broad human sympathy ; the same keen knowledge of human 
nature, toned and tempered and made the more true by his sympathies; the same mys- 
terious and indefinable element of divine life, so that his message comes with a quasi 
authority, wholly unecclesiastical, purely personal ; and the same undertone of sadness, 
the same touch of pathos, speaking low as a man who is saddened by his own seeming 
success, — a success which is to his thought, and in comparison with his ideals, a failure. 
No minister can read carefully these lectures without getting a profounder sense of the 
true grandeur of his work, and a clearer conception of at least some of the secrets of 
success in its prosecution." — Harper's Magazine. 

" No one in our country has had more continuous or more conspicuous success in 
preaching than Mr. Brooks; and the book he has given us points directly to the princi- 
ples which underlie his power. No one can read it and go on repeating the proverb, 'as 
drj' as a sermon,' if only sermons shall be conceived and delivered in the moral and in- 
tellectual atmosphere with which these lectures surround the subject. 

"The teaching in these lectures is of necessity full of vitality. It is to be compared not 
so much to a treatise on tactics or an exhortation to enlist, as to a strain of martial 
music inspiring the enthusiasm of a soldier. It is withal very noble and very genuine. 
No theological student could ever read it and doubt that character lay at the bottom of 
his success. Full of inspiring suggestions as it is, no one could glean from it any comfort 
in trusting to inspirations and neglecting work and study." — ScribnerU Monthly. 

"The enthusiasm for the profession which this book displays has contagion in it, be- 
cause it is not expended on that which separates the profession from other occupations, 
but on that which it shares with them. Throughout the book runs a single thought never 
lost sight of, — the greater the man the greater the preacher; and again and again, when 
discoursing of practical methods, the lecturer returns in some form to his golden text, that 
it is the man behind the sermon which makes the sermon a power. It is because the 
lecturer, holding this truth firmly, addresses himself to the living facts of a preacher's 
profession rather than to the mechanism or elaborate organization in which he works, that 
his words will be life to the living and glittering generalities to the moribund." — Atlantic 
Monthly. 

" We do not hesitate to say that they are of more practical value than any work of the 
sort we have ever seen It is a book to be read for the feeling it awakens, but feel- 
ing so lofty that it is one with wisdom and truth." — Literary World. 

" Nothing of the kind can be superior to his first four lectures. They might be truly 
described as an analysis of the elements of Christian manliness, and as a statement of the 
conditions on which men who preach can hope to win other men. Nearly every page con- 
tains something over which the reader lingers with delight." — N'ew I'ork Times. 

"No man, lay or clerical, who likes bright thoughts and clear, artistic expression, can 
afford to neglect this volume." — Ne^v York Sun. 

" There is a noble breadth and height and depth to each of these lectures. They are 
both roomy and full. Of all the courses which have been given on this foundation, we 
remember none that are more vital, fresh, and inspiring. One does not need to be a min. 
ister to read them wiih great satisfaction and great improvement." — Boston Advertiser 

" It would be very easy to fill columns with fresh, sagacious, subtile, trtte observations 
from these pages." — Boston Evening Transcript. 



For sale at all Bookstores, or sent by mail, post-paid, on receipt of price. 

E. P. BUTTON & CO., Publishers, 
713 Broadway, New York. 



SERMONS 



BT THE 



REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS 

KECTOR OF TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 



#""% 




^^'i^i 



NEW YORK 
E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 

1878 



CoprwGHT, 1878, 
By E. p. DUTTON AND COMPANY 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDOE : 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 

U. 0. UOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



To 

THE THllEE PARISHES 

■WHICH IT HAS BEEN HIS PRIVILEGE TO SEETB, — 

THE CHURCH OF THE ADVENT, PHILADELPHIA, 
THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY, PHILADELPHIA, 

AND 

TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON,— 

ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 
Br THEIR 

FRIEND AND MINISTER. 



CONTENTS. 



PASE 

I. The Purpose and Use of Comfort . . .1-18 

"Blessed be the God of all comfort, who comforteth us 
in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them 
which are in any trouble, by tlie comfort wherewith we our- 
selves are comforted of God." — 2 Corinthians i. 3, 4. 

II. The Withheld Completions of Life . . 19-36 

"Peter said unto Him, Lord, why cannot I follow Thee 
now? " — John xiii. 37. 

III. The Conqueror from Edom ..... 37-56 

"Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed gar- 
ments from Bozrah? " — Isaiah Ixiii. 1. 

IV. Keeping the Faith ...... 57-77 

" I have kept the faith." —2 Timothy iv. 7. 

V. The Soul's Eefuge in God 78-97 

" Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence 
from the pride of man. Thou shalt keep them secretly in a 
pavilion from the strife of tongues." — Psalm xxxi. 20. 

VL The Consolations of God ..... 98-116 

"Are the consolations of God small with thee? " — Job 
XV. 11. 

VIL All Saints' Day 117-137 

"After this I beheld, and lo, a groat multitude, which 
no man could number, of all nations, and kiiidruds, and 
people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before 
the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their 
hands; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to 
our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb." 
— Revelation vii. 9, 10. 



VI CONTENTS. 

VIII. The Man with One Talent . . • . . 138-156 
"Then he which had received the one talent came." — 
Matthew xxv. 24. 

IX. The Present and Future Faith .... 157-173 

" When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on 
the earth ? " — Luke xviii. 8. 

X. Unspotted from the World .... 174-192 

"And to keep himself unspotted from the world." — 
James i. 27. 

XI. A Good-Friday Sermon 193-209 

"Then were there two thieves crucified with Him." — 
Matthew xxvii. 38. 

" I am crucified with Christ." — Galatians ii. 20. 

XII. An Easter Sermon 210-227 

"And He laid His right hand upon me, sajnng unto me, 
Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am he that liveth, 
and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; 
and have the keys of hell and of death." — Revelation i. 
17, 18. 

XIII. A Trinity-Sunday Sermon 228-246 

"For through Him we both have access by one Spirit 
unto the Father." — Ephesians ii. 18. 

XIV. Is it I' 247-264 

'• And as they did eat, Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, 
that one of you shall betray nie. And they were exceed- 
ing sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto 
him, Lord, Is it I? " — Mattheir xxvi. 21, 22. 

XV. The Food of Man 265-281 

"It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone." — 
Matthew iv. 4. 

XVI. The Symbol and the Reality .... 282-298 

" The sun shall be no more 11 ly light by day: neither for 
brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the 
Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God 
thy glory." — Isaiah Ix. 19. 



CONTENTS. Vll 

XVII. Christ's Wish for Man 299-314 

"Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given me 
be with me where I am: that they may behold my glory." 
— John xvii. 24. 

XVIII. The Shortness of Life 315-333 

"Brethren, the time is short." — 1 Corinthians vii. 29. 

XIX. Humility 334-352 

"And be clothed with humility." — 1 Peter v. 5. 

XX. The Positiveness of the Divine Life . . 353-371 

"This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not 
fulfil the lusts of the flesh." — GaUitians v. 16. 



SERMONS. 



I. 

THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 

• 
"Blessed be the God of all comfort, who comforteth us in all our tribu- 
lation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, 
by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God." — 2 Cor. 
i. 3, 4. 

The desire for comfort may be a very high or a very 
low, a noble or a most ignoble wish. It is like the love 
of life, the wish to keep on living, which may be full 
of courage and patience, or may be nothing but a cow- 
ardly fear of death. We know what kind of comfort it 
must have been that St. Paul prayed for, and for which 
he was thankful when it came. We have all probably 
desired comfort which he would have scorned, and prayed 
to God in tones which he would have counted unworthy 
alike of God and of himself. 

And the difference in the way in which people ask 
comfort of God, no doubt, depends very largely upon the 
reason why they ask it, upon what it is that makes them 
wish that God would take away their pain and comfort 
them. The nobleness of actions, we all know, depends 
more upon the reasons why we do them than on the acts 
themselves. Very few acts are so essentially noble that 
they may not be done for an ignoble reason, and so be- 
come ignoble. Very few acts are so absolutely mean that 



2 THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 

some light may not be cast through them by a bright mo- 
tive burning within. And so it is not merely with what 
we do, but with what happens to us. It is not our fort- 
une in life, our sorrow, or our joy ; it is the explanation 
which we give of it to ourselves, the depth to which we 
see down into it, that makes our lives significant or in- 
significant to us. 

All this, I think, applies to what St. Paul says about 
the comfort which God had given him. He gave to it its 
deepest and most unselfish reason, and so the fact of 
God's comforting him became the exaltation and the 
strengthening of his life. I should like to study his feel- 
ing about it all with you this morning. Out of your 
closets and pews, from many hearts that need it, hearts 
sore and wounded with the world, there go up prayers 
for comfort. This verse of St. Paul seems to me to shine 
with a supreme motive for such prayers as those, a mo- 
tive which perhaps as we first look at it will seem over- 
strained and impossible ; but which I hope we shall see is 
really capable of being felt, and of stirring to their deep- 
est depths the desire and the gratitude of a strong man. 

It does not matter what the special trouble was for 
which God had comforted St. Paul. It happened to be a 
certain deep anxiety about his church at Corinth. But 
it might have been anything. The point is this — that 
Paul thanked God because the comfort which had come 
to him gave him the power to comfort other people. 
" Blessed be the God of all comfort, who comforteth us 
in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort 
them which are in any trouble." Now, my dear friends, 
try to recall the joy and peace and thankfulness that 
have ever filled your hearts when you became thoroughly 



THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 3 

sure that God had relieved you from some great dan- 
ger, or opened His hand and shed upon you some great 
blessing. Think how you thanked Him. Remember 
how the sense that He loved you occupied your soul. 
Think how your sense of privilege exalted you and sol- 
emnized you. Think how your own happiness filled you 
with kindliness to other people. But ask yourself at 
the same time, " Did any such thought as this come up 
first and foremost to my mind, and seem to me the most 
precious part of all my blessing, that God had done this 
for me just to make me a fitter and more transparent 
medium through which He might send his comfort to 
other men ? When He lifted me up from the gates of 
death did I thank Him most of all that my experience 
of danger and deliverance had made clear to some poor 
sufferer beside me how truly our God is the Lord of life 
and death ? When He came and filled with His own 
presence the awful blank of my bereavement, did I praise 
Him most devoutly that my refilled and recreated life 
could become a gospel to other men of the satisfaction 
of His perfect friendship ? " But this was the beauty 
of God's comfort to St. Paul. " Blessed be God who 
comforteth us, that we may be able to comfort them 
which are in any trouble." 

In the first place, then, I think the power of Paul or of 
any man to grasp and realize this high idea of the pur- 
pose of the help which God sends, shows a very clear un- 
derstanding that it is really God who sends the help. In- 
deed, I think no man can really mount up to the idea that 
God truly and personally cares for him enough to reach 
down and turn the bitterness of his cup to sweetness, 
without being, as it were, compelled to look beyond him- 



4 THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COilFORT. 

self. All strong emotions, all really great ideas, outgo our 
individual life, and make us feel our human nature. If 
you are not sure that any mercy comes to you from God ; 
if, whatever pious words you use about it, the recovery 
of your health, or the saving of your fortune, seems to 
you a piece of luck, some good thing which has dropped 
down upon you from the clouds, then you may be meanly 
and miserably selfish about it. You shut it up within the 
jealous walls of your own life. It is a light which you 
have struck out for yourself, and may burn in your own 
lantern. But if the light came down from God, if He 
gave you this blessing, it is too big for you to keep to 
yourself. He must have meant it for a wider circle than 
your little life can cover, and it breaks through your self- 
ishness to find for itself the mission that it claims. Oh, if 
men who are disgusted at their own selfishness and unsym- 
pathetic narrowness, and who try to break through it and 
come to their fellow-men in love, but cannot, would learn 
this higher and profounder method, that the only way 
really to come close to and to care for men is to realize 
God ; the only way to love the children is to know the 
Father ; the only way to make it our joy and mission to 
help mankind is to feel all through us the certainty that 
the help which has come to us has come from God ! 

Go on a little farther. A man whose first thought 
about any mercy to himself is that God means by it to 
help other people, must have something else besides this 
strong belief that his mercy does really come from God. 
He must have a genuine unselfishness and a true humil- 
ity. He must have a habit of looking out beyond him- 
self, a yearning and instinctive wish to know how what 
comes to him will change the lot and life of other people ; 



THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 5 

and, along with this, a lowly estimate of his own self, a 
true humbleness of self-esteem. Put these together into 
a nature and you clear away those obstructions which, in 
so many men, stop God's mercies short, and absorb, as 
personal privileges, what they were meant to radiate as 
blessings to mankind. Think of it even in reference to 
the lowest things. Who is the man whom we rejoice to 
see possessing wealth ? Who is the man whose making 
money on the street delights us, because it means bene- 
faction and help to other men? It is the reverent, the 
unselfish, and the humble man. It is the man who, as the 
treasure pours in at his doors, stands saying over it, 
" God sent this ; " and, " I am not worthy of this ; He 
could not have sent it just for me ; " and, " Where are 
my brethren ? " Reverence, Humility, Unselfishness. 
Those are the elements of true stewardship even in the 
lowest things, and also in the highest. Who is the man 
who, in his bereavement or his pain, receiving comfort 
from God radiates it, so that the world is richer by the 
help the Lord has given him ? It is the reverent, the 
unselfish, and the humble man. The sunlight falls upon 
a clod, and the clod drinks it in, is warmed by it itself, 
but lies as black as ever, and sheds out no light. But 
the sun touches a diamond, and the diamond almost 
chills itself as it sends out in radiance on every side the 
light that has fallen on it. So God helps one man bear 
his pain, and nobody but that one man is a whit the 
richer. God comes to another sufferer, reverent, unself- 
ish, humble, and the lame leap, and the dumb speak, and 
the wretched are comforted all around by the radiated 
comfort of that happy soul. Our lot has been dark in- 
deed if we have not known some souls, reverent, unselfish, 



6 THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 

liumble, who not merely caught and drank in themselves, 
but poured out on other sufferers, on us, the comfort of 
God. 

I know one danger which I may seem to incur as I 
speak thus. It may appear as if in order to find a deep, 
far-reaching purpose in God's goodness to our souls, to 
trace it out into designs for other people, we had to take 
away something from its freedom and spontaneousness ; 
as if it interfered with that first consciousness of the re- 
ligious life, the first and most surprising, as it is also the 
last and sweetest and most inexhaustible, that God loves 
each of us distinctly, separately, and blesses each of us out 
of His personal love. Nothing must interfere with that. 
Whatever mercy falls into our lot must be felt warm 
with the personal love of Him who sends it. It would be 
better to lose all the larger and longer thoughts of God's 
care for the world, and think of Him, as men have 
thought, merely in the light of His love for the individual, 
than to become so absorbed in the larger thought that 
the individual should seem to be only the unconsidered 
machinery through which His power reached the world, 
blessed by accident, as it were, and on the way, as the 
blessing sped to some more general and distant need. 
But we are reduced to no such dilemma. The simpler 
ideas of religion include the more profound, and open 
into them without losing their own simplicity. The soul, 
I think, which has really reached the idea that what God 
does for it has purposes beyond it in the good of others, 
comes to a deeper knowledge of the love of God for it. 
It finds itself honored with confidence and use, as well as 
gratified with happiness. The older chiklren of a family 
gradually come to the knowledge of what deeper purposes 



THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 7" 

run through the government of the household. When a 
child is young, it seems as if his father's purpose concern- 
ing him were just that he should find every hour pleasant, 
and be happy all the time. As he grows up he learns 
that his father is treating him with reference to some- 
thing which lies deeper than his happiness, and also that 
what his father does to him has reference to the whole 
family, and is part of a larger scheme. Does that lessen 
the warmth of his personal gratitude and love ? Not 
unless he is a very mean-minded and jealous child indeed. 
If he has any largeness of character, it all comes out. A 
new sacredness appears in the kindness when its designs 
are known, and as gratitude grows reasonable it grows 
deeper. So it is with gratitude to God. The supersti- 
tious devotee begs for a kindness which is to have no end 
beyond himself. He asks for comfort and help as if he 
had to tease it from a God of whims ; but the Christian 
asks, as his highest privilege, to be taken into the pur- 
poses of a purposeful Father, and counts it the best part 
of the stream which refreshes his life, that it goes on 
through his to refresh some other life beyond. Oh, let us 
never fear that in making God considerate and reason- 
able we shall lose His affection ; let us never try to keep 
His love by denying His law. Let us be sure that the 
more we realize His vaster purposes, the more dearly we 
can feel His personal care. 

And one thing more let me say here. This higher 
thought of God and His blessings will always be easier 
and more real to us in proportion as we dwell habitually 
upon the profounder and more spiritual of His mercies. 
If what I am in the habit of thanking God for is mainly 
food and clothes and house, it will not be easy for me to 



8 THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 

realize the deepest purpose for which God gives me those 
things ; it will be very easy for me to take them as if 
the final purpose of them was that I might be warm and 
well-fed. But if what I thank Him for is spiritual 
strength, the way in which He helps me bear pain, resist 
temptation, and feed upon spiritual joy, — in one word, if 
what I thank Him for most is not that He gives me his 
gifts, but that He gives me Himself, — then I cannot re- 
sist the tendency of that mercy to outgrow my life. The 
more spiritual is a man's religion, the more expansive 
and broad it always is. A stream may leave its deposits 
in the pool it flows through, but the stream itself hurries 
on to other pools in the thick woods ; and so God's gifts 
a soul may selfishly appropriate, but God Himself, the 
more truly a soul possesses Him, the more truly it will 
long and try to share Him. 

Thus I have tried to picture the man who in the pro- 
foundest way accepts and values God's mercies. You 
see how clear his superiority is. The Pharisee says, " I 
thank Thee that I am not as other men are," and evi- 
dently it is his difference from other men that he values 
most, and he means to keep himself different from other 
men as long as possible. The Christian says, " I thank 
Thee that Thou hast made me this, because it is a sign 
and may be made a means of bringing other men to the 
same help and joy." You see how different the two men 
are : one is hard and selfish ; the other is warm and gen- 
erous. And yet there must be people here this morning 
who have knelt side by side and both said sincerely, " We 
bless Thee for our creation, preservation, and all the 
blessings of this life," who were as far apart from one 
another as the Pharisee is from the Christian spirit. 



THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 9 

But having said thus much in general about the way 
in which men receive God's comforts, now I should like 
to take, one after another, a few of the special helps 
which God gives to men, and see, very briefly, how what 
I have been saying applies to each of them. 

The first of the comforts of God to which I would 
apply our truth is the comfort which God sends a man 
when he is in religious doubt. And that does not by any 
means always take the shape of a solution of his difficul- 
ties, and a filling of every darkness with perfect light. 
God may do that. God does often do that for men. I 
think that none of us ever ought to believe that any re- 
ligious difficulty of his is hopeless, and to give it up in 
despair. We ought always to stand looking at every 
such difficulty, owning its darkness, but ready to see it 
brighten as the east briglitens with the rising of the sun. 
Many of our religious doubts ai'e like buildings which 
stand beside the road which we are travelling, which, as 
we first come in sight of them, we cannot understand. 
They are all in confusion. They show no plan. We 
have come on them from the rear, from the wrong side. 
But, as we travel on, the road sweeps round them. We 
come in front of them. Their design unsnarls itself, 
and we understand the beauty of wall and tower and 
window. So we come to many religious questions from 
the rear, from the wrong side. Let us keep on along the 
open road of righteousness. Some day we shall perhaps 
face them and see their orderly beauty. 

No doubt God does thus answer our questions for us 
sometimes if we will " walk in His ways." But he knows 
little of the abundance of God's mercy who thinks that 
there is no other comfort for the doubting man than this. 



10 THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 

He has had little experience of God who has not often 
felt how sometimes, with a question still unanswered, a 
deep doubt in the soul unsolved, the Father will fold 
about His doubting child a sense of Himself so deep, so 
true, so self-witnessing, that the child is content to carry 
his unanswered question because of the unanswerable as- 
surance of his Father which he has received. Is that 
a fancy ? Surely not. Surely you are comforting your 
child just in that way every day; comforting him with 
your love, and tlie peace of your presence, which passeth 
all his understanding, for the hundred questions which 
you cannot answer, and the hundred puzzles which you 
cannot make him understand. Suppose God gives that 
sort of comfort to any man. Thenceforth the doubter 
goes with his curious doubts, not solved, but wrapt about 
and lost in the richness of a personal faith. But tell me, 
is it the gain of that one doubter only ? Is the world no 
richer ? Is no other questioner helped ? Oh, when I see 
how few men are aided by the arguments with which 
their friends plead for their faith, compared with those to 
whom religion becomes a clear reality from the sight of 
some fellow-man who is evidently living with God, who 
carries the life of God wherever he goes ; when I see how 
the real difficulty of multitudes of bewildered men is not 
this or that unsolved problem, but the whole incapacity of 
comprehending God ; when I see this, I understand how 
the best boon that God can give to any group of men 
must often be to take one of them — the greatest of them 
it may be, the least of them it may be — and, bearing wit- 
ness of Himself to him, set him to bearing that witness 
of the Lord to his brethren which only a man surrounded 
and filled with God can bear. 



THE PUKPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 11 

And when we look at the other side, at the doubter 
himself, and his feeling about the removal of his doubt, it 
is even more plain. I can find no certainty about relig- 
ious things, and I hardly dare ask for certainty. It seems 
like haggling and arguing with God to tell him of my 
doubts. Who am I that He should care to convince me 
and answer ray questions ? It is a bad mood, but it is 
common enough. But if I can count my enlightenment 
as something greater than my own release from doubt ; if 
I can see it as part of the process by which "the light 
that lightenetli every man " is slowly spreading through 
the world, then it no longer is insignificant. I dare to 
hope for it. I dare to pray for it. I make myself ready 
for it. I cast aside frivolity and despair, the two benight- 
eners of the human soul, and when God comes and over, 
under, nay, through every doubt proves Himself to me, I 
take Him with a certainty which is as humble as it is 
solemn and sure. 

2. Turn to another of the consolations which God sends 
to men : the way He proves to us that the soul is more 
than the body. In the breakage or decay of physical 
power He bikings out spiritual richness and strength. 
This was something that St. Paul knew well. Only two 
chapters later in this same epistle there conies the great 
verse where he describes it. " Though our outward man 
perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day." It 
is something whose experience is repeated constantly on 
every side of us. It is hard for us to imagine how flat 
and shallow human life would be if there were taken out 
of it this constant element, the coming up of the spiritual 
where the physical has failed ; and so, as the result of 
this, the impression, made even upon men who seem to 



12 THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 

trust most in the physical, that there is a spiritual life 
which lies deeper, on which their profoundest reliance 
must and may be placed. A man who has been in the 
full whirl of prosperous business fails in these hard- 
pressed days, and then for the first time he learns the joy 
of conscious integrity preserved through all temptations, 
and of daily trust in God for daily bread. A man who 
never knew an ache or pain comes to a break in health, 
from which he can look out into nothing but years of 
sickness ; and then the soul within him, which has been 
so borne along in the torrent of bodily health that it has 
seemed almost like a mere part and consequence of the 
bodily condition, separates itself, claims its independence 
and supremacy, and stands strong in the midst of weak- 
ness, calm in the very centre of the turmoil and panic 
of the aching body. The temper of the fickle people 
changes, and the favorite of yesterday becomes the victim 
of to-day ; but in his martyrdom for the first time he sees 
the full value of the truth he dies for, and thanks the 
flames that have lighted up its preciousness. Now ask 
yourself in all these cases if it must not be an element in 
the comfort which fills the sick room, or gathers about the 
martyr's stake, that by this revelation of the spiritual 
through the broken physical life other men may learn its 
value. This is what makes the sick rooms and the mar- 
tyr fires reasonable. In them has been made manifest 
by suffering that the soul is really more than the bod}^, 
that the soul can triumph when the body has nothing left 
but disease and misery. There are young people here 
looking forward to their lives, wondering what God has 
in reserve for them in these mysterious and beautiful 
years which lie before them. It may be health, strength. 



THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 13 

joy, activity. I trust it is. But you must own that it 
would be no sign of God's displeasure, but rather of His 
truest love, if the life which He assigned should prove to 
be all comprised in this : that by some form of suffering 
and disappointment you were first to find out for yourself, 
and then to manifest to some circle of your fellow-men, 
that the soul is more precious than the body, and has a 
happiness and strength which no bodily experience can 
touch. What would you not suffer if your life could be 
made a beacon to show the world that ? 

This is the secret of great men. And in all the greatest 
men there is some sense of this always present. No man 
has come to true greatness who has not felt in some de- 
gree that his life belongs to his race, and that what God 
gives him He gives him for mankind. The different de- 
grees of this consciousness are really what makes the dif- 
ferent degrees of greatness in men. If you take your man 
full of acuteness, at the top of his specialty, of vast knowl- 
edge, of exhaustless skill, and ask yourself where the mys- 
terious lack is which keeps you from thinking that man 
great, — why it is that although he may be a great nat- 
uralist, or a great merchant, or a great inventor, he is not 
a great man, — the answer will be here, that he is selfish : 
tliat what God gives him stops in himself ; that he has no 
such essential humanity as to make his life a reservoir 
from which refreshment is distributed, or a point of radia- 
tion for God's light. And then if you take another man, 
rude, simple, untaught, in whom it is hard to find special 
attainments or striking points of character, but whom you 
instinctively call great, and ask yourself the reason of that 
instinct, I think you find it in the fact that that man has 
this quality: that his life does take all which it receives. 



14 THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 

not for its own use but in trust ; that in the highest sense 
it is unselfish, so that by it God reaches men, and it is 
His greatness that you feel in it. For greatness after 
all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a cer- 
tain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be 
present in lives whose range is very small. There is 
greatness in a mother's life whose utter unselfishness fills 
her household with the life and love of God, transmitted 
through her consecration. There is greatness in a child's 
life who is patient under a wrong and shows the world 
at some new point the dignity of self-restraint and the 
beauty of conquered passions. And thence we rise until 
we come to Christ and find the perfection of His human 
greatness in His transmissiveness ; in the fact that what 
He was as man. He was not for Himself alone but for all 
men, for mankind. All through the range of human life, 
from lowest up to highest, any religious conception of 
human greatness must be ultimately reducible to this : a 
quality in any man by which he is capable first of taking 
into himself, and then of distributing through himself to 
others, some part of the life of God. 

I spoke just now of Jesus and His greatness. It seems 
to me that most of the struggles of theology to define 
His work are really trying to get hold of and utter this 
idea : that in Him was the perfect power of uttering God 
to men and of being full of God not for Himself only but 
for mankind. His headship of our race. His mediator- 
ship. His atonement, are various ways of stating this idea. 
Everything that He was and did. He was and did for us. 
He lived his life. He died his death, for us. He took sor- 
row for us. He took joy and comfort for us also. Let 
me not say that Christ saves us only by what He suffered 



THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 15 

for us. He saves us by what He enjoyed for us too. The 
completeness and unity of His salvation lies in the com- 
pleteness and unity with which His whole life, in its joy 
and pain together, lies between us and God, so that 
through it God comes to us and we go to God. Let us 
always pray that we may lose the blessing of no part of 
the complete mediatorship of our Mediator. 

3. There is one other of the comforts of God to which 
I hoped that we might apply our truth, but I must take 
only a moment for it. I mean the comfort which God 
gives a man who has found out his sin and has repented of 
it. That comfort is forgiveness, — forgiveness promised 
by Christ, assured by the whole loving nature of God, 
and sealed by the new life of thankful obedience which 
begins at once in the forgiven nian. And what shall we 
say of that forgiveness ? Is it only for the forgiven man 
that it is bestowed, that God loves to bestow it so ? It 
often seems to me as if we took too low a ground in 
pleading with the man living in sin and indifference to 
turn around, to be converted and live another life. We 
tell him of his danger. That puts it on the lowest ground. 
We assure him that no man can go on in wilful sin in a 
universe over which a good God reigns, without sooner 
or later coming to unhappiness, nay, without really being 
in unhappiness all the time, however it may seem to him. 
We go higher than that : we tell him of the happiness of 
the life with God. We assure him of faculties in himself, 
capable of a kind of pleasure which he does not know, 
which will come out to their true enjoyment if he will 
only come to God. We tell him of the heaven of the 
inner life here, and then point onward to the dim but 
certain joys of the heaven that stands with its golden 



16 'IHK PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 

walls and gates of pearl in the splendor of the revelation 
there. Many men hear and believe. Many men hear and 
do not believe. Suppose we took a higher strain ; sup- 
pose we cast all selfishness aside ; suppose we pointed 
to a world all full of wickedness, a world self-willed, re- 
bellious against God ; suppose we went to men and said : 
"Think of this. Every time any man humbly takes 
God's forgiveness, enters into Christ's service, begins a 
godly life, that man becomes a new witness to this world 
of how strong and good the Saviour is. Here is Christ. 
There are the men who need Him. If you will let Him 
fill and possess your life. He will make these men see Him 
through you. And look, how they need to see Him ! 
Not for yourself now, but for them, for Him, take His 
forgiveness and give up yourself inwardly and outwardly 
to Him." So used one grows to find men respond to the 
noblest motives who are deaf to a motive which is less 
noble, that I am ready to believe that there are men 
among you, whose faces I know, whom I have so often 
urged to be Christians, who might feel this higher appeal. 
Is it nothing that by a new purity and devotion in your 
life, brought there by obedience to Christ, you may help 
men out of their sins to Him ? His promises seem to 
the men you meet too good to be true, so glorious and 
sweet that they are unreal. Take them to yourself. Let 
them shine in their manifest power through the familiar 
windows of your life. Be a new man in Christ for these 
men's sake. Put your hand in His, that as He leads you 
other men, who have turned away from Him, may look 
and see you walking with Him, learn to love Him through 
your love. I do not believe any man ever yet genuinely, 
humbly, thoroughly gave himself to Christ without some 



THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 1( 

other finding Christ through him. I wish it might tempt 
some of your souls to the higher life. I hope it may. 
At least I am sure that it may add a new sweetness and 
nobleness to the consecration which some young heart is 
making of itself to-day, if it can hear, down the new path 
on which it is entering, not merely the great triumphant 
chant of personal salvation, " Unto Him that loved us 
and washed us from our sins be glory and dominion ; " 
but also the calmer, deeper thanksgiving for usefulness, 
" Blessed be the God of comfort, who comforteth us that 
we may be able to comfort them that are in tribulation." 
Such are a few of the illustrations and applications of 
the truth which I have tried to define and to urge upon 
you this morning. The truth is that we are our best 
when we try to be it not for ourselves alone, but for our 
brethren ; and that we take God's gifts most completely 
for ourselves when we realize that He sends them to us 
for the benefit of other men, who stand beyond us need- 
ing them. I have spoken very feebly, unless you have 
felt something of the difference which it would make to 
all of us if this truth really took possession of us. It 
would make our struggles after a higher life so much 
more intense as they become more noble. " For their 
sakes I sanctify myself," said Jesus ; and He hardly ever 
said words more wonderful than those. There was the 
power by which He was holy ; the world was to be made 
holy, was to be sanctified through Him. I am sure that 
you or I could indeed be strengthened to meet some gi-eat 
experience of pain if we really believed that by our suf- 
fering we were to be made luminous with help to other 
men. They are to get from us painlessly what we have 
got most painfully from God. There is the power of the 

2 



18 THE PURPOSE AND USE OF COMFORT. 

bravest martyrdom and the hardest work that the world 
has ever seen. 

And again, it would make our spiritual lives and ex- 
periences more recognizable and certain things. Not by 
mere moods, not by how I feel to-day or how I felt yes- 
terday, may I know whether I am indeed living the life of 
God, but only by knowing that God is using me to help 
others. No mood is so bright that it can do without that 
warrant. No mood is so dark that, if it has that, it need 
despair. It is good for us to think no grace or blessing 
truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some 
one else with it through us. 

I have not painted an ideal and impossible picture to 
you to-day, my friends. This truth and all the motives 
that flow from it may really fill your life. They filled 
the life of Christ. Come near to Him ; be like Him, and 
they shall fill yours. So your Gethsemane and the an- 
gels that come to you after it may be precious to you 
as His were to Him, not only for the peace which they 
brought Him, but because they were to be the fountain of 
strength and hope to countless souls forever. May God 
grant us something of the privilege of Christ, which was 
to live a manly life for God's sake, and also to live a 
godly life for men's sake ; for it was thus that He was a 
mediator between God and man. 



II. 

THE WITHHELD COMPLETfONS OF LIFE. 

"Peter said unto Him, Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now ? " — John 
xiii. 37. 

It is from passages like this that we have all gathered 
our impression of St. Peter's character, an impression 
probably clearer and more correct than we have with 
regard to any other of the Lord's disciples. Here is all 
his impulsiveness and affection, the unreasonableness and 
impatience which still excite our admiration and our 
love because they strike the note of a deeper and di- 
viner reason, of which the prudent people seldom come 
in sight. They were sitting together at the Last Sup- 
per. Jesus had just told his friends that He must leave 
them. Simon Peter was the first to leap forward with 
the question, " Loixl, whither goest Thou ? " Jesus re- 
plied, " Whither I go thou canst not follow me now, but 
thou shalt follow me afterwards." There was the promise 
of a future companionship between the disciple and the 
Master, which was to carry on and complete the compan- 
ionship of the past, whose preciousness was now coming 
out as it drew near its close. There opened before the 
loving man a mysterious but beautiful prospect of some 
more perfect paths tlirongli which he might walk with 
Jesus, and find the completion of that intercourse of which 
the well-remembered walks through the streets of Jerusa- 



20 THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 

lem and the lanes of Galilee had been only the promise. 
The keen joy of dying with his Lord seemed all that was 
needed to finish the joy of living with Him ; and when he 
sees all this deferred, when Christ is, as it seems, gather- 
ing up His robes to walk alone into the experience that 
lies before Him, Peter breaks out in a cry of impatience, 
" Why cannot I follow Thee noiv ? " The life with Jesus, 
which is the only life for him, seems to be passing hope- 
lessly away. The promise of a future day when it shall 
be restored to him does not satisfy him ; indeed it hardly 
seems to take hold of him at all. He wants it now. It 
was unreasonable. So it is unreasonable when by the side 
of your friend's grave you wish that you could die and 
enter at once upon the everlasting companionship. So it 
is unreasonable when, as your friend goes alone into a 
cloud of sorrow, the sunlight of prosperity in which you 
are left standing seems hateful to you, and you grudge 
him his solitary pain. How unreasonable Peter was ap- 
peared only a few hours later, when his denial proved 
his unfitness to go with Jesus into the mystery and pain 
which He was entering. It is an unreasonable impa- 
tience, but it is one that makes us love and honor the 
unreasonable man, and adds a new pleasure to the study 
of all Peter's after-life, as we watch him treading more 
and more in his Lord's footsteps, and at last really fol- 
lowing his Lord into His glory. 

It has seemed to me as if this verse opened a great 
subject, one which is continually pressing upon us, one 
that is full of practical bewilderments ; a subject that 
must come home to the thoughts of many of the people 
in this congregation. That subject is, The Withheld 
Completions of Life. St. Peter felt dimly that the life of 



THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 21 

Jesus was opening into something so large that all which 
had gone before would be seen to have been only the ves- 
tibule and preparation for what was yet to come. He 
vaguely felt that this death, in whose shadow they were 
sitting, was the focus into which all the lines along which 
they had travelled were converging only that they might 
open into larger and more wonderful fields of experience. 
And just then, when his expectation was keenest, when 
his love was most eager, an iron curtain fell across his 
view. " Whither I go thou canst not follow me now," 
said Jesus. The completion was withheld. The life of 
Jesus was broken off, and they who had lived with Him 
were left standing bewildered and distressed in front of 
the mystery which hid Him from their sight. 

And that is what is always happening ; what it is so 
hard for us to understand and yet what we must under- 
stand, or life is all a puzzle. For all our life has its ten- 
dencies. It would be intolerable to us if we could not 
trace tendencies in our life. If everything stood still, or 
if things only moved round in a circle, it would be a 
dreary and a dreadful thing to live. But we rejoice in 
life because it seems to be carrying us somewhere ; be- 
cause its darkness seems to be rolling on towards light, 
and even its pain to be moving onward to a hidden joy. 
We bear with incompleteness, because of the completion 
which is prophesied and hoped for. But it is the delay 
of that completion, the way in Avhich, when we seem to 
be all ready for it, it does not come ; the way in which, 
when we seem to be just on the brink of it, the iron cur- 
tain drops across our path ; this is what puzzles and dis- 
tresses us. The tendencv that is not allowed to reach the 
fulfillment which alone gave it value seems a mockery. 



22 THE WITHHELD CORIPLETIONS OF LIFE. 

You watoh your plant growing, and see its wonderful 
building of the woody fibre, its twining of the strong 
roots, its busy life-blood huri-ying along its veins. The 
dignity and beauty of the whole process is in the com- 
pletion which it all expects. Some morning you step into 
your garden and the deep-red flower is blazing full-blown 
on the stem, and all is plain. The completion has justi- 
fied the process. But suppose the plant to have been all 
the time conscious of the coming flower, to have felt its 
fire already in the tumultuous sap, and yet to have felt it- 
self held back from blossoming. Not to-day ! not to-day ! 
each morning as it tried to crown itself with the glory 
toward which all its tendencies had struggled. Would 
it not be a very puzzled and impatient and unhappy 
little plant, as it stood wondering why its completion was 
withheld, and what delayed its flower ? 

Now there are certain conditions which are to all good 
life just what the flower is to the plant. They furnish 
it its natural completion. They crown its struggles with 
a manifest success. There are certain fine results of feel- 
ing and contentment which are the true and recognized 
results of the best ways of living. They crown the hid- 
den resolutions and the prosaic struggles of men with 
beautiful conclusiveness, as the gorgeous flower finishes 
all that the buried root and the rugged stalk of the plant 
have done, and make it a perfect and satisfactory thing. 
The flower is the plant's success. These conditions of 
peace and pleasure are the life's success in the same way. 
But when the life, conscious of the character in itself out 
of which these conditions ought to come, finds that they 
do not come, finds that it pauses on the brink of its com- 
pletion and cannot blossom, then comes bewilderment; 



THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 23 

then come impatient questionings and doubts. This is 
the state of many lives, I think, especially about relig- 
ious things. I want to speak with you of this, and see 
if we can get any light upon it. 

But lest I speak too vaguely, let me take special in- 
stances. In that way we can understand it best; and 
here is the first, perhaps the simplest. Suppose we have 
a man thoroughly, genuinely, unselfishly devoted to the 
good of fellow-men. It is not so uncommon as we think. 
It matters not upon what scale the self-devotion may 
take place. A poor obscure woman in a sick-room giv- 
ing her days and nights, her health and strength, to some 
poor invalid ; or a great brilliant man out in the world 
neglecting his personal interests in the desire that some 
of the lagging causes of God may be helped forward, or 
that the men of the city may be better clothed and fed 
and housed. Now such a life, in whatever scale it may 
be lived, has its legitimate completion. There is one 
natural and healthy result to which it is all tending, 
one flower into whose beauty its hard work was made to 
bloom. The natural flower which should crown that life 
of self-devotion is men's gratitude. The joyous, thank- 
ful recognition of your fellow-men is the true issue of 
the life which gives itself for them. Perhaps in ringing 
cheers that make the world stand still to listen, perhaps 
only in the weak, silent pressure of the hand, or the last 
feeble ligliting of the eyes, with which he whose sick-bed 
you have watched thanks you unutterably just as he 
dies ; some way or other, thanks is the completion of ser- 
vice. The two belong together, service and thanks ; not 
in the way of bargain, not by deliberate arrangement, 
but in the very nature of the things. The man who does 



24 THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 

no good expects no thanks. The selfish Hfe feels and 
shows the nnnatui-alness if men make a mistake and lav- 
ish their gratitude upon it. It is as if men tied the glo- 
rious flower on to the top of a wooden post that has no 
germinating power. But to the life that serves, the grat- 
itude that recognizes service belongs as the warmth be- 
longs to the sunlight, or the echo to the sound. And 
now suppose that the gratitude does not come. Your 
friend turns his face to the wall and dies, and never looks 
at you. The people pass you by, and waste their cheers 
upon some charlatan who has been working for himself. 
What then ? Is there no disappointment of the soul ; no 
sense of a withheld completion ; no consciousness of some- 
thing wrong, of something that falls short of the com- 
plete and rounded issue which was natural ? Indeed 
there is ! " What does it mean ? " you ask with wonder, 
even wnth impatience. 

And in answer to your wondering question there are 
two things to be said. The first is this : that such a 
suspension of the legitimate result, this failure of the 
flower to complete the plant, does show beyond all doubt 
a real condition of disorder. The natural result of your 
self-devotion has not come because the state of things in 
which you live is unnatural. That must be recognized. 
There is a reason in your wonder and surprise. Some- 
thing is wrong. If you let your surprise appear, if men 
can see, as they look into your face, pain and bewilder- 
ment at their ingratitude, no doubt they will misunder- 
stand you. They will laugh and jeer. They will cry, 
" Oh, after all, then, you were not unselfish ; you did this 
thing not for us, but to be seen of men and to be thanked. 
It is good enough for you not to get it if that was what 



THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 25 

you wanted." But it may very well be that they are 
wrong ; you were unselfish ; you did not work for thanks. 
When the thanks do not come it is not your loss, it is 
the deranged, disordered state of things which the world 
shows that troubles you. When Jesus wept over un- 
grateful Jerusalem, did He not feel its ingratitude ? But 
was it not the disturbed Avorld where such ingratitude 
was possible, and not any mere loss of recognition of 
Himself, which lay at the bottom of his grief ? When 
your child is ungrateful to you, is it the neglect of your- 
self, or is it not the deranged family, the broken and 
demoralized home, that saddens you? It is the violation 
of a deep, true instinct. I think that this is always on 
Christ's soul. The world's ingratitude to Him showed 
Him how wrong the world was. In a perfect world 
every tendency must open to its result. Its Christ must 
be greeted with hosannas. They who receive His bless- 
ings must give Him their praise. The world is broken 
and disordered, that is the first thing that is meant when 
you help men and they scorn you, when the world's ben- 
efactors are neglected or despised. 

But let us never think that we have reached all the 
meaning when we have reached that. Because any state 
of things is unnatural, it does not prove that there can 
come out of it no blessing. God very often leaves the 
consequences of a man's sins untouched, but in the midst of 
thera makes it possible for His servant to live all the 
better life by the very derangements and distortions by 
which he is surrounded. So it is here. The service that 
a man does to his fellow-men does not bring down their 
gratitude upon him. And what then ? There is a bless- 
ing which may come to him even out of the withhold- 



26 THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 

ing of the legitimate completion of his service. It may 
throw him back upon the nature of the act itself, and 
compel him to find his satisfaction there. Many a man 
who, having served his brethren in public or in private, 
has looked up from his work with a true human longing 
that his work should be recognized, and heard no sound 
of gratitude, has then retreated to the self-sacrifice itself 
and found, in the mere doing of that, an even deeper, 
even keener joy than he could have gathered from the 
most spontaneous and hearty thanks. That has been 
the support, the inner triumph of many a despised re- 
former and misunderstood friend. Men have found a joy 
which they could not have had in a world undisturbed, 
and whose moral order was perfect. The essence of any 
act is more and finer than its consequences are. It is 
better to live in the essence of an act than in its conse- 
quences or rewards. The consequences of an act are 
meant to interpret and manifest its essence ; but if at 
any time the withholding of its consequence can drive us 
home more deep into its essence, is it not a blessing ? 

I think we cannot doubt that Christ's life manifested 
the essential and eternal joy of serving God, the dignity 
and beauty of helping man, as it could not have done if it 
had been heralded by the trumpets and followed b}^ the 
cheers of human gratitude. Because He was " despised 
and rejected of men," we are able to see more clearly 
how truly He was His Father's " well-beloved Son." And 
if, as it may be, you, with no morbidness, no self-conceit, 
no querulousness, know that you have been helping some 
man, or some hundred men, from whom you get no grati- 
tude, — the manly thing for you to do in that withhold- 
ing of the natural completion of your life is just what 



THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 27 

Christ did : first own that the world is out of order, and 
do not look with any certain confidence for a recognition 
which could be certain only in a world of moral perfect- 
ness ; and then let its withholding drive you home to the 
blessedness of the service of other men in and for itself, 
recognized or unrecognized, thanked or unthanked, and 
to companionship with God, who understands it all. 

As we come into the regions of more truly spiritual 
experience this truth of the withheld completions of life 
becomes more striking, and often much more puzzling. 
As we come to that history which goes on within a man's 
own heart, and where the action of other men does not 
intrude, it seems more strange that each cause cannot 
produce its full effect, and each growth blossom to its 
appointed flower. But even here I think that if we keep 
in mind the two considerations which I have been speak- 
ing of we shall find in them, if not the sufficient explana- 
tions, at least the supporting consolations of the withheld 
completions of our life. Look, for instance, at the con- 
nection of duty and happiness. Happiness is the natural 
flower of duty. The good man ought to be a thoroughly 
bright and joyous num. This is no theoretical convic- 
tion. It is the first quick instinct of the human heart. 
We do not know, I think, how deep in us lies this assur- 
ance that goodness and happiness belong together, how 
impossible it would be to take it out of us without de- 
rangring all our life. Just think, if there were no such 
assurance, what a dreadful thing happiness would be in 
the world. If to be happy meant nothing, or meant 
badness, if it had no connection with being good, how a 
laugh in the street would be dreadful to us, and the look 
of a bright, gay, happy face would strike u[)on our con- 



28 THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 

science like a cloud that sweeps across the sun. But no ! 
From the innocence of childhood uttering itself in the 
child's sunny joy, on through the whole of life, there runs 
one constant conviction that goodness and happiness be- 
long tosrether. That conviction meets a thousand con- 
tradictions, but it is too strong for them all. It runs 
like a mountain stream along a course all blocked with 
rocks of difficulty ; but none of them can permanently 
hinder it or turn it back. It slips under or around them 
all, this deep and live conviction that the tendency of 
goodness is to happiness. In this conviction lies the 
poetry of human life. This conviction has planted the 
Edens which all races have discerned behind them, and 
painted the Heavens which they have all seen before 
them. It is bound up with all belief in God. To cease 
to believe it would be to bow down at the footstool of 
a devil or a chance, and which of these would be the 
most terrible master who can say ? With this convic- 
tion strong in us we come to some man's life, — a life 
which we are sure is good ; to call it wicked is to con- 
fuse all our idea of wickedness and goodness. And that 
life is all gloomy. Duty is done day after day, but done 
in utter dreariness ; there is no smile upon the face, no 
ring of laughter in the voice ; a good man, a just and 
pure man, a man who hates sin and whom you would not 
dare to think of tempting, and yet a sad man, not a glad 
man ; a man to whom life is a burden, not an exhilara- 
tion and a joy. Such men there ai"e ; good without 
gladness, shocking and perplexing our deep certainty that 
to be good and to be glad belong together. To them 
we want to bring the two considerations which I dwelt 
on when I was speaking of self-sacrifice and gratitude. 



THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 29 

To recognize that it is unnatural, and so to struggle 
against it, not to yield to it, and yet, while it must last, 
to get what blessing we can out of it, by letting it drive 
us down deeper for our joy and comfort, into the very 
act and fact of doing righteousness, that is all that we 
can do, and that is enough to do when the golden link 
is broken and doing rigliteousness does not blossom into 
being happy. " I am trjing to do right," a man says, 
" and yet the world is all dark to me ; what can you 
say to me ? Will you tell me still that there is a nat- 
ural connection between doing right and being happy ? " 
Surely I will, I answer. I will insist on your remember- 
ing it. I will warn you never to forget it, nor .to get to 
counting gloominess the natural air and atmosphere of 
duty. I will beg you never to think it right, that when 
you are trying to be good you should still be unhappy. 
You must struggle against it. And yet, you must let the 
very fact that the connection can be broken prove to you 
that while the union of duty and joy is natural it is not 
essential and unbreakable. The plant ought to come to 
flower, but if the plant fails of its flower it is still a plant. 
The duty should open into joy, but it may fail of joy and 
still be duty. If the joy is not there, still hold the duty, 
and be sure that you have the real thing while you are 
holding that. Be all the more dutiful, though it be in 
the dark. Do righteousness and forget happiness, and so 
it is most likely that happiness will come. This is all 
that one can say, and this is enough to say. It will help 
the man neither despondently to submit to nor franti- 
cally to rebel against the imnatural postponement of the 
happiness which belongs to his struggle to do right. It 
will help him to be hopeful without impatience, and 
patient without despair. 



30 THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 

But take another case, that comes still more dis- 
tiiK^tly within the limits of Christian experience. There 
are promises in the Bible, many of them, which declare 
that dedication to God shall bring communion with God. 
" Draw near to me and I will di'aw near to you," sayS 
God. And even without the special promise, that whole 
revelation of God which the Bible gives us involves such 
a necessity. It cannot be that a God all love surrounds 
us with His life, presses upon us, waits for us on every 
side, and yet the meanest soul can really turn to Him and 
throw itself open before Him, and not receive Him into 
its life. And yet sometimes the man does give himself 
to God, and the promise seems to fail. The heart draws 
near to God in conscious dedication, and it seems as if no 
answering communion came. The soul is laid upon the 
altar, and no hand of fire is seen reached out from heaven 
to take it up in love. Day follows day, year follows 
year, it may be, and the man given to God trembles 
when he hears other men talk of the joy of divine com- 
munion, because no such ever comes to him. Once more, 
to such a soul, to any such soul which is here to-day, 
there are the same two messages to bring. Never, no 
matter how long such exclusion from the presence of God 
may seem to last, though it go on year after year a,nd 
you are growing old in your seeming orphanhood ; never 
accept it, never make up your mind to it that it is right ; 
never cease to expect that the doors will fly open and 
you will be admitted to all the joy of your Father's felt 
love and of unhindered communion with Him. Never 
lose out of your soul's sight the seat which is set for you 
in the very sanctuary of divine love. And what beside ? 
Seek even more deeply the satisfaction which is in your 



THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 31 

consecration itself ; and that you may find it, consecrate 
yourself more and more completely. Oli, it may well be 
that there are some of you who are listening intently at 
this moment, thinking perhaps that now, after a thousand 
disappointments in a thousand sermons, you may hear 
the word you need, which shall explain this terrible sep- 
aration from your Father, which, while you give your- 
selves with all your souls to Him, still keeps you shut 
out from His communion. I cannot tell you all you 
want to know. Nobody can. But there are two great 
anxieties which I do feel for such a soul as yours. One 
is, lest you should give up hoping for and expecting that 
privilege of communion which, however long it be de- 
layed, because you are a child of God is certainly yours 
in possibility, and must certainly be yours some day in 
possession. The other is, lest, since the consecration has 
not brought you the communion, you should think that 
the consecration is unreal, and so lose the power to be 
blessed by it, and the impulse to increase it. Christ has 
led you with Him thus far up to the line where you have 
given yourself to Him. Before you, open the fields where 
you see the privilege of having His fulness given to you. 
But something seems to come across and shut you out 
from them. No wonder that you lift up a cry almost of 
bitterness : " Why cannot I follow thee now? Why this 
delay of the divinest life ? Why so much duty with so 
little strength ? Why only the journey and the hunger 
and the thirst, without the brook of refreshment by the 
way ? " No man can wholly answer these questions, but 
multitudes of saints, if they could speak, would tell you 
how in their hindered lives God kept them true to such 
experience as they had attained ; and so it was that, by 



32 THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF JIFE. 

and by, either before or after the great enlightenment of 
death, the hindrance melted away, and they who had 
been crying for years, " Lord, why cannot we follow Thee 
now?" passed forth into the multitude of those who 
" follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth." 

There is one other of the withheld completions of life 
of which I should like to speak, and onlj'- one. Among 
Christ's promises there is none that is dearer to one class 
of minds, minds of a very pure and noble character, than 
that which He spoke one day when He was in discussion 
with the Jews in the Temple. " If any man wills to 
do my will," He said, " he shall know of the doctrine, 
whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself." I 
have been struck by seeing how favorite a text that has 
become in our day. Many minds have rested upon it. 
Many earnest seekers after truth, bewildered by the diffi- 
culties of doctrine, almost ready to give up in despair, 
have welcomed this declaration of the Lord, and gone out 
with new hope, that by the dedication of their wills, by 
trying to become obedient to Christ, they should come to 
understand the Christ who was so dark to them. Many 
and many a soul has found that that was indeed the mes- 
sage that it needed. Turning away from vain disputes of 
words, leaving theological subtleties alone, just trying to 
turn what it knew of Christ into a life, it has found — 
what He promised — that it has become assured of His 
divinity, sure that His doctrine was of God. Such souls 
have not found that the thousand curious questions of 
theology were answered, and all the mystery rolled away 
out of the sky of truth. Christ did not promise that. 
But they have found what He did promise : that coming 
near to Him in obedience, they have been made sure of 



THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 33 

the true divinity that was in Him and in the teachings 
that He gave. Such testimony comes abundantly from 
all the ages, and from many souls to-day. It is not 
strange. It is like all Christ's teachings, — one utterance 
of an essential universal truth. Everywhere the flower of 
obedience is intelligence. Obey a man with cordial loy- 
alty and you will understand him. Obey Jesus with cor- 
dial loyalty and you will undei-stand Jesus. Not by 
studying Him, but by doing His will, shall you learn 
how divine He is. Obedience completes itself in under- 
standing. 

And now are there any of us from whom that comple- 
tion seems to have been withheld ? Are there any of us 
who, trying hard to do the Lord's will wherever He has 
made it known to them, looking for it continually, are yet 
distressed to know that their Lord's nature has not be- 
come all clear to them ? They must be sure, first, that 
they are right ; sure that Christ has not done for them 
what He promised, though He may not have done what 
they chose to expect. They must be sure that they have 
not really come to an essential faith that the doctrine of 
Jesus is divine. To many souls that faith has come, while, 
bewildered still by various forms of expression, they can- 
not even recognize their own belief. They must be sure 
again that their will to serve Christ has been indeed true ; 
not simply the trying of an experiment from which they 
still reserved the liberty to withdraw, but the unreserved 
and total dedication of themselves to Him. And wliat 
then ? Sure of all this, still the darkness and the doubts 
remain. Then they must come, it seems to me, to the two 
principles wiiich I have enforced this morning. Tlien 

they must say to themselves : " This is unnatural ; it 
3 



04 THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 

ought not to be. My service, my true will-dedication 
ought to bi-ing me out into the light ; at least I will re- 
member that. I will not be content with darkness. I 
will not let despair of positive belief settle down on me 
with its cliilling power. I will not rest until my service 
of Christ completes itself in the knowledge of Christ: and 
yet all the time while I am waiting I will find joy in 
the service of Him, however dimly I may apprehend Him. 
I will find deeper and deeper satisfaction in doing His 
will, though it be in the midst of many doubts, though 
I be sorely puzzled when men ask me to give my account 
of Him. It may be that just because obedience is not 
able at once to complete itself in knowledge, the pure 
joy and deep culture which are in obedience itself may 
come to me more really and more richly." That is 
no barren lesson, my dear friends, to come to any man. 
You would not find it a barren lesson if it could come to 
you to-day. If to your life, struggling in obedience to 
Christ, but not able to clear itself into light about Christ, 
there could come, as from the Christ you long for, a com- 
mand to you to struggle on still in hope because you 
must reach the light some day ; and yet a command, 
while the light is withheld, to find satisfaction and growth 
in the ever-deepening struggle, would not that be the com- 
mand you need ? Oh that in His name I could utter this 
message to any souls who are thus trying to do His will, 
and yet seeming not to know His doctrine ! Oh that I 
could bid them with His voice to persevere because there 
is light ahead, and yet to be thankfid even now for the 
culture of the darkness ! " Whither I go thou canst not 
follow me now, but thou shalt follow me afterwards." 
" Watch, therefore ! " 



THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 35 

I hope, then, that I have made clear this story of the 
withheld completions of. our human life. The plant grows 
on toward its appointed flower, but before the blossom 
comes some hand is laid upon it, and the day of its blos- 
soming is delayed. I have dwelt on a few illustrations, 
but the truth is everywhere. The emotional and affec- 
tional conditions are the natural flower of the wills and 
dedications of our life. But we resolve, we dedicate our- 
selves, and, though the prophecy and hope immediately 
beghi to assert themselves all through us, the joy, the 
peace, the calmness of assurance, does not come. We are 
like southern plants, taken up to a northern climate and 
planted in a northern soil. They grow there, but they are 
always failing of their flowers. The poor exiled shrub 
dreams by a native longing of a splendid blossom which it 
has never seen, but is dimly conscious that it ought some- 
how to produce. It feels the flower which it has not 
strength to make in the half chilled but still genuine 
juices of its southern nature. That is the way in which 
the ideal life, the life of full completions, haunts us all. 
Nothing can really haunt us except what we have the be- 
ginning of, the native capacity for, however hindered, in 
ourselves. The highest angel does not tempt us because 
he is of another race from us ; but God is our continual 
incitement because we are His children. So the ideal life 
is in our blood, and never will be still. We feel the 
thing we ought to be beating beneath the thing we are. 
Every time we see a man who has attained our human 
idea a little more fully than we have, it wakens our lan- 
guid blood and fills us with new longings. When we see 
Christ, it is as if a new live plant out of the southern soil 
were brought suddenly in among its poor stunted, trans- 



36 THE WITHHELD COMPLETIONS OF LIFE. 

planted brethren, and, blossoming in their sight, inter- 
preted to each of them the restlessness and discontent 
which was in each of their poor hearts. When, led by 
Christ, we see God, it is as if the stunted, flowerless 
plants grew tall enough to stand up and look across all 
the miles that lie between, and see the glory of the per- 
fect plant as it blooms in unhindered luxuriance in its 
southern home. And when we die and go to God, it is as 
if at last the poor shrub were plucked up out of its exile 
and taken back and set where it belonged, in the rich 
soil, under the warm sun, where the patience which it had 
learned in its long waiting should make all the deeper and 
richer the flower into which its experience was set free to 
find its utterance. 

Patience and struggle. An earnest use of what we 
have now, and, all the time, an earnest discontent until 
we come to what we ought to be. Are not these what 
we need, — what in their rich union we could not get, ex- 
cept in just such a life as this with its delayed comple- 
tions? Jesus does not blame Peter when he impetuously 
begs that he may follow Him now. He bids him wait 
and he shall follow Him some day. But we can see that 
the value of his waiting lies in the certainty that he shall 
follow, and the value of his following, when it comes, will 
lie in the fact that he has waited. So, if we take all 
Christ's culture, we are sure that our life on earth may 
get already the inspiration of the heaven for which we 
are training, and our life in heaven may keep forever the 
blessing of the earth in which we were trained. 



III. 

THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 

" Who is this that cometli from Edom, with dyed garments from Boz- 

rah?" — IsAiAU Ixiii. 1. 

This chapter of Isaiah opens in a strain of the loftiest 
prophetic poetry. A representative of Israel stands look- 
ing down one of the long ravines which open from the 
central mountain region of the country toward the val- 
ley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea. As he watches he 
sees a stranger approaching him, who has crossed the val- 
ley from the heights beyond, where the enemies and the 
heathen live, and is climbing up into the hills of Judea. 
It is an heroic figure. The stature is grand. The head 
is proud and high. The steps are free and stately. The 
garments are noble, and here and there upon them, stain- 
ing and illustrating their brightness, are the marks of 
blood. The Genius of Israel, for so we may conceive of 
the first speaker, is filled with amazement and challenges 
the new-comer with this ringing question : " Who is this 
tliat Cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Boz- 
rah ? This that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in 
the greatness of his strength?" Then comes the answer: 
" I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save." As he 
comes nearer the mysterious and awful stains upon his 
clothing become more clear, and the Genius questions him 
again : " Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and 



38 THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 

thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat ? " 
And then the great stranger answers, with the story of 
a struggle and a victory : " I have trodden the wine- 
press alone, and of the people there was none with me ; 
for I will tread them in mine anger and trample them in 
my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my gar- 
ments, and I will stain all my raiment. For the day of 
vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed 
fs come. And I looked, and there was none to help ; and 
I wondered that there was none to uphold : therefore 
mine own arm brought salvation unto me, and my fury it 
upheld me. And I will tread down the people in mine 
anger and make them drunk in my fury, and I will bring 
down their strengtli to the earth." 

What does it mean ! — the prophetic Genius waiting, 
watching, and questioning ; the mighty stranger com- 
ing fresh from victorious battle, with the robe red as if 
with the stain of grapes, coming up from Edora, with 
dyed garments from Bozrah ? Edom, remember, was 
the country where the Israelites' most inveterate enemies 
lived. No other nation pressed on them so constantly or 
gave them such continual trouble as the Edomites. And 
Bozrah was the capital city of Edom, the centre of its 
power. When the conqueror comes from Edom, then, 
and finds Israel anxious and eager upon the mountain, 
and shows her his stained robe in sign of the struofsrle 
which he has gone through, and then tells her that the 
victory is complete, that because he saw that she had no 
defender he has undertaken her defence and trodden 
Edom under foot for her, we can understand something 
of the power and comfort of such a poetic vision to the 
Hebrew's heart. There may have been some special 



THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 39 

event which it commemorated. Some special danger may- 
have threatened on the side of the tumultuous Edom- 
ites, and some special unexpected deliverer may have ap- 
peared who saved the country, and was honored by this 
song of praise. 

But every such special deliverance to the deep relig- 
ious and patriotic feeling of the Jew had a much wider 
meaning. Every partial mercy to his nation always 
pointed to the one great mercy which was to embrace all 
others, to the coming of the Messiah, whose advent was 
to be the source of every good, and the cure of every 
evil. This larger strain sounds under all their Psalms of 
thankfulness or hope. In their darkest days every little 
ray of light was a stray gleam of this great sun-rising 
which was at hand. Everj'^ sound of success seemed like 
His far-off footstep. And so these words of Isaiah mount 
to a higher strain than any that could have greeted an 
Israelite warrior who might have made a successful incur- 
sion into Edomite soil. The prophet is singing of the 
victorious Messiah. He, that majestic figure that haunts 
all Hebrew history and makes it all poetic, — He it is that 
conies up from Edom, which stands here to represent the 
sum of all the foes of Israel, with stained garments that 
show the terribleness of the struggle, and with step and 
face that manifest the completeness of His victory. It is 
the triumph of the Messiah that is being sung. 

This brings it, as you see, close to us. This Hebrew 
Messiah has come, and is more than the Hebrew Messiah : 
He is the Christian's Christ, He is our Saviour. See how 
the old vision is elevated once more to a yet larger ap- 
plication. The victory of Christ, the destruction of evil 
by good, the conquest over the devil by the Son of God, 



40 THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 

at cost, with pain, so that as He comes forth His robes 
are red with blood ; the redemption of mankind from sin 
by the divine and human Saviour, — this is tlie largest 
and completest meaning of the ancient vision. This is 
what the old poetry of Isaiah has to say to us. Let us 
look at this to-night and try to understand it. Let us 
try to get at some knowledge of the Saviour coming back 
from His victorious work with the blood-stains on His 
garments and the blessings of peace in His full hands to 
give to all His people. 

I think that very often now this sounds strange and 
incomprehensible; this absorption of every struggle be- 
tween the good and the evil that is going on in the 
world into the one great struggle of the life and death 
of Jesus Christ ; but it follows necessarily from any such 
full idea as we Christians hold of what Jesus Christ is 
and of what brought Him to this world. If He be really 
the Son of God, bringing in an utterly new way the 
power of God to bear on human life ; if He be the nat- 
ural creator-king of humanity, come for the salvation of 
humanity ; then it would seem to follow that the work 
of salvation must be His and His alone : and if we see 
the process of salvation, the struggle of the good against 
the evil, going on all over the world, we shall be ready 
still to feel that it is all under His auspices and guidance ; 
that the effort of any benighted soul in any darkest 
heathen land to get away from its sins, and cast itself 
upon an assured mercy of its God, is part of His great 
work, is to the full intelligent faith of the well-taught 
Christian believer just what the struggle of a blind plant 
underground to reach the surface is to the free aspira- 
tion of the oak-tree, which in the full glory of the sun- 



' 



THE CONQUEEOR FROM EDOM. 41 

light readies out its eager branches toward the- glorious 
sun, — a result of the same power, and a contribution to 
the same victorious success. All forces strive after sim- 
plicity and unity. Operations in nature, in mechanics, in 
chemistry, which men have long treated as going on 
under a variety of powers, are gradually showing them- 
selves to be the fruits of one great mightier power, which 
in man}' various forms of application is able to produce 
them all. This is the most beautiful development of our 
modern science. The Christian belief in Christ holds 
the same thing of the spiritual woi'ld, and unites all 
partial victories everywhere into one great victory which 
is the triumph of its Lord. Notice, I beg you, that on 
no other ground can Christianity stand with its exclusive 
claims, and Christianity is in its very nature exclusive. 
Some vagrant ship carries you over the waters and sets 
you down in some most heathen island, where no single 
ear has ever heard the first word about the incarnation, 
about the birth at Bethlehem or the death on Calvary. 
You live there long enough to get into the heart of those 
savage folk and understand them, you see what their 
souls are about, and lo, underneath the thick crust of 
savage life you find the same old eternal struggle of good 
and evil, of right and wrong, nay more, very blindly, 
very darkly, you find the same old reaching after God, 
and the same assurance that He is love and that He may 
show Himself in forgiveness, which you left behind you 
in the f;imiliar streets and pews of Boston. What shall 
you say about it ? That what is good in Boston is not 
good in your island ? That good and evil change their 
characters with changing climates ? That confuses your 
whole moral judgment. Shall you say that this good in 



42 THE CONQUEROR FROJI EDOM. 

the island comes of some local source, distinct from that 
which made the Christians good and brave and patient 
whom you used to know at home ? That cuts the moral 
world to bits and leaves no unity and so no certainty or 
strength. What then ? If I believe in Christ at home, 
I believe in Him off here. Not so strongly because in 
the dark, but yet strongly because it is His, here is the 
power of the human Christ at work. Once accept what 
is the central truth of operative Christianit}^, the power 
of an ever-present unseen Spirit, always manifesting 
Christ and making Him influential, and then it is not 
hard to see that, men being the same, open to the same 
influence everywhere, they may be and they are turned 
to the one same goodness by the power of the one same 
spirit of Christ. 

Indeed here, in the susceptibility of all men to the 
same influences of the highest sort, there comes out the 
only valuable proof of the unity of the human race, I 
think. Demonstrate what you may about the diversity 
of origin or structure of humanity, so long as the soul 
capable of the great human struggle and the great hu- 
man helps is in every man, the human race is one. On 
the other hand, demonstrate as perfectly as you will the 
identity of origin and structure of all humanity, yet if 
you find men so spiritually different in two hemispheres 
that the same largest obligations do not impress and the 
same lai'gest loves do not soften them, what does your 
unity of the human race amount to ? Here, it seems to 
me, Christ, in His broad appeal to all men of all races, is 
the true assertor of the only valuable human unity. 

If this be so, then wherever there is good at work in 
the world, we Christians may see the progress of the 



THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 43 

struggle and rejoice already in tlie victory of Christ. It 
does us good. It enlarges and simplifies our thought of 
Christ's religion. He shall conquer. The eye of faith 
already sees Him coming up out of Edom with the stains 
upon His garments and the step of the victor. He shall 
conquer. But when we say that, we are driven home to 
Him and Him alone as our religion. He, nothing else. I 
have no assurance that this Church, this form of worship, 
nay, even this minute faith which I believe in and which 
is very dear to me, — I have no assurance that this is to 
conquer all other churches, all other sects, and occupy the 
world. I feel very sure that Christ, before He attains 
His perfect victory, must throw His truth into new and 
completer forms than any it has yet assumed. I wait for 
those in perfect patience and without a fear, sure only 
of this one thing : that Christ will conquer, and in His 
victory, however it shall come, the old vision of the He- 
brew prophet shall be stretched to cover the results of 
universal history, and so the whole world shall be saved 
in Him. 

And now let us go on and look as far as we may into 
the method of this salvation ; first for the world at large 
and then for tlie single soul, which of course is the point 
of infinitely the most importance to each of us. And in 
both let us follow the story of the old Jewish vision. 

"Who is this that cometh from Edom?" Sin hangs 
on the borders of goodness everywhere, as just acros? 
the narrow Jordan valley Edom always lay threateningly 
upon the skirts of Palestine. Plow terribly constant it 
was. How it kept the people on a strain all the while. 
The moment that a Jew stepped across the border, the 
Edomites were on him. Tlie moment a flock or beast of 



44 THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 

his wandered too far, the enemy had seized him. If in 
thei carelessness of a festival the Israelites left the bor- 
der unguarded, the hated Edomites found it out and came 
swooping down just when the mirth ran highest and the 
sentinels were least careful. If a Jew's field of wheat 
was specially rich, the Edomite saw the green signal from 
his hill-top, and in the morning the field was bare. There 
was no rest, no safety. They had met the chosen people 
on their way into the promised land, and tried to keep 
them out ; and now that they were safely in, there they 
always hovered, wild, implacable, and watchful. There 
could be no terms of compromise with them. They never 
slept. They saw the weals point in a moment ; they 
struck it quick as lightning strikes. The constant dread, 
the nightmare, of Jewish history is this Edom lying 
there upon the border, like a lion crouched to spring. 
There cannot be one great fight, or one great war, and 
then the thing done forever. It is an endless fight 
with an undying enemy ! 

Edom upon the borders of Judah. We open any page 
of human history and what do we see ? There is a higher 
life in man. Imperfect, full of mixture, just like that 
mottled history of Hebrewdom ; yet still it is in hu- 
man history what Judea was in the old world, — the 
spiritual, the upward, the religious element ; something- 
that believes in God and struggles after Him. Not a 
page can you open but its mark is there. Sometimes it 
is an aspiration after civilization, sometimes it is a doc- 
trinal movement, sometimes it is a mystical piety that 
is developed ; sometimes it is social ; sometimes it is as- 
cetic and purely individual ; sometimes it is a Soci'ates, 
sometimes it is a St. Francis, sometimes it is a Luther, 



THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 45 

sometimes it is a Florence Nightingale. It is there in 
some shape always : this good among the evil, this power 
of God among the forces of men, this Judah in the midst 
of Asia. But always right on its border lies the hostile 
Edom, watchful, indefatigable, inexorable as the redoubta- 
ble old foe of the Jews. If progress falters a moment, 
the whole muss of obstructive ignorance is rolled upon it. 
If faith leaves a loop-hole undefended, the quick eye of 
Atheism sees it from its watch-tower and hurls its quick 
strength there. If goodness goes to sleep upon its arms, 
sleepless wickedness is across the valley, and the fields 
which it has taken months of toil to sow and ripen are 
swept off in a night. Tell me, is not this the impression 
of the world, of human life, that you get, whether you 
open the history of any century or unfold your morning 
newspaper ? The record of a struggling charity is crowded 
by the story of the prison and the court. The world 
waits at the church door to catch the worshipper as he 
comes out. The good work of one century relaxes a mo- 
ment for a breathing spell, and the next century com.es 
in with its licentiousness or its superstition. Always it is 
the higher life pressed, watched, haunted by the lower ; 
always it is Judah with Edom at its gates. No one great 
battle conies to settle it forever : it is an endless fight 
with an undying enemy. 

So in the great world. How is it in these little worlds, 
these hearts Avhich we are carrying about ? You have your 
good, your spirituality, your better life ; something that 
bears witness of God. In every man's heart there is a 
holy city, a Jerusalem, where, loud or mufHed, in some 
voice from the altar or some light above the mercy-seat, 
the Heavenly Father bears testimony of His goodness and 



46 THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 

tempts us to Himself. It may be very dim, but there it 
is in all of us. There it is in you. Hence in all men the 
struggle of that good with a surrounding evil; the parable 
of the old Asiatic geography forever wrought out into 
hot, terrible life. Do you not know it, my friend, this 
Edom of the lower life lianging upon the borders of tlie 
Judea Avhich is the better life in you? You mean to be 
pure ; you want to be pure ; but some day you venture 
a mile across the border of impurity by some low jest or 
foul indulgence, and who is the foe that seizes you and 
bears you off captive into the heart of his detestable do- 
minion, where he keeps you prisoner, whence you come 
out, at last, only with a tottering body and a corrupted 
soul ? You mean to be true ; but once your truth sleeps 
on its guard, and the Edomite is over the valley, and the 
lie is right in the very midst of your well-guarded truth- 
fulness. You love humility ; but some day your humility 
keeps a careless feast of self-confidence, and before you 
know it the shout of the invader pride is in your ears. 
How evil crowds you. You cannot fight it out at once 
and have it done. You go on quietly for days and think 
the enemy is dead. Just when you are safest there he 
is again, more alive than ever. I am trying to tell the 
story of each ordinary life. I am trying to make you 
think of that bad that lurks sleeplessly by the side of 
every good. When did you ever do a good thing with 
that pure, sweet, clear, strong, and open confidence with 
which they must do holy things who do them in angelic 
freedom on the open plains of heaven, where from bright 
horizon to horizon there is nothing but safety and God ? 
We live a spiritual life like the life that our fathers used 
to live here in New England, who always took their guns 



THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 47 

to church with them and smoothed down the graves of 
their beloved dead in the church-yard that the hostile 
and watchful Indians might not know how weak they 
were. It is the Saviour's word, "Behold, I send you forth 
as sheep among wolves ; " only the sheep and the wolf 
are both within us : Judah, with Edom forever at its gate. 

It is no wonder that just as Edom to the Jews became 
a great, terrible person, a giant lingering forever with 
hungry mouth and watchful eyes to seize them and de- 
vour them at ever}'' exposure, so to men getting this idea 
of the vigilance and malignity of sin, sin too should have 
appeared a terrible person, and the human mind should 
have most readily adopted the scripture image of the 
Satan, the personal Devil, always waiting, watching, 
hating. It is no wonder that sin, just like Edom, should 
have stood out as one undying foe. The change of gen- 
erations never broke its power. It was the same enemy 
with which their fathers and their grandfathers and their 
great-grandfathers fought. The dreadful conflict between 
Judah and Edom lasted on from age to age, always the 
same. It was an immortal enemy, an eternal war. 

And so when we look back over life, how dreary some- 
times it seems. What are men doing in the fifth century, 
or the tenth, or the fifteenth ? The old familiar strife 
and hatred and crime winch we know so well, how they 
burst out upon us with their hoarse fury the moment that 
we force open those old rusty doors. Tiie Barbarians 
are massacring and pillaging in Italy. The Roman Em- 
perors are slaughtering their subjects and dying them- 
selves by poison. The Inquisition is doing its liorrible 
work in Spain. This in public life ; and then if any- 
where you lift a little corner of the merciful cover of ob- 



48 THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 

livioii that has fallen upon private life, the same old tu- 
mult of distress and wickedness is there : poverty, temp- 
tation, jealousy, hatred, deceit, making the little trag- 
edies of those old homes, just as they turn the decent 
houses along our decent streets to-day into nests of un- 
clean birds. All the while, bright, open, sights of good- 
ness, generosity, truth, self-devotion, godliness ; these ai'e 
the Judahs ; but all the while the Edoms close beside 
them, just as we see them now. 

And if you turn back and look at the history of your 
own life, which sometimes seems to you as if it had lasted 
as long as all the history of all the ages put together, 
what was it that began to break on you as a boy of ten, 
when you first began to realize yourself ? Was it not a 
wonder whether you were meant to be good or bad, so 
terribly, and so equally, as it seemed, the two powers 
were matched against each other in your life ? How 
did your life look to you when you were a young man 
of twenty ? If you had found that verse of St. Paul's, 
did it not tell the whole story when you heard him cry, 
" When I would do good, evil is present with me " ? And 
when you were the full-grown strong man of forty, what 
then ? Had not the strength of the enemy grown with 
your strength ? Had not many a power of evil, which 
you used to make little of and think your life would shed, 
fastened itself close upon you and showed that it meant 
to stay, so that in some moods there still was no word but 
Paul's, " O wretched man that I am ; who shall deliver 
rae from the body of this death ? " So all along your 
life. The enemy shifts his point of attack, but he is 
always there. It gets to seem hopeless as the man gets 
old, and feeble compromises with this terrible insatiate 



THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 49 

neighbor take the place of the young man's manly 
struggles to drive him out. 

Here is where the hopelessness comes in, out of mere 
long experience. I think there is in every man's heart, 
down at the bottom, a conviction that the good is stronger 
than the bad ; that the right is mightier than the wrong. 
I think that any being of pure human nature looking 
from outside at this strange mixture, this unnatural civil 
war that is going on forever, would say cheerfully, " Oh, 
it cannot last long, the good is so powerful that no evil 
can stand against it. Wait a few moments longer and 
you will see it cast the intruder out." I think every 
young man starts with some such cheerful, courageous 
confidence as this. It is only experience that undeceives 
us and discourages us. The intruder is not cast out. 
There he is, just as strong as he was yesterday, just as 
strong as he was ten years ago ; nay, just as strong as 
when Abraham fought with him on the field of Mamre, 
or when the hermits struggled in vain to get the better 
of him in the caves on the banks of the Nile. There 
seems to be no reason why, unless some new force comes 
in, the struggle should not go on forever as inconclusively, 
as hopelessly as it has gone on so long ; no reason why 
the two forces should not live together and fight to- 
gether till death comes to separate them ; nay, no reason 
why death should separate them ; no reason why the two 
should not go down together striving into the dark river, 
and come out striving still upon the other side, and go on 
in eternal strife, perpetuating this human tragedy forever. 
This is the great discouraging burden of our experience 
of sin. " We look and there is none to help. We won- 
der that there is none to uphold." No power of salva- 
4 



50 THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 

tion comes out of the good half of the heart to conquer 
and to kill the bad. We grow not to expect to see the 
bad half conquered. Every morning we lift up our eyes, 
and there are the low black hill-tops across the narrow 
valley, with the black tents upon their sides, where Edom 
lies in wait. Who shall deliver us from the bad world 
and our bad selves ? 

And what then ? It is time for the sunrise when the 
night gets as dark as this. It is time for the Saviour 
when the world and the soul have learnt their helpless- 
ness and sin. " Who is this that cometh from Edom, 
with dyed garments from Bozrah ? this that is glorious in 
His apparel, travelling in the greatness of His strength ? " 
Do you not see the parable now ? Is it possible that 
this one that we see coming, this one on whose step, as 
He moves through history, the eyes of all the ages are 
fastened, — is it possible that He is the conqueror of the 
enemy and the Deliverer of the Soul ? He comes out of 
the enemy's direction. The whole work of the Saviour 
has relation to and issues from the fact of sin. If there 
had been no sin there would have been no Saviour. " He 
came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." 
He comes from the right direction, and He has an attrac- 
tive majesty of movement as He first appears. This, as 
to the watcher on the hill-tops of Judea, so to the soul 
that longs for some solution of the spiritual problem, 
some release from the spiritual bondage, is the first as- 
pect of the approaching Christ. He comes from the 
right way, and He seems strong. I suppose this is what 
draws the souls of men, long before they know the whole 
deep secret of the Christhood, to gather round Him and 
gaze on Him with a vague, wistful interest, — this sort of 



THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. ol 

sense tliat because He has taken on Himself to deal with 
their most hopeless difficulty, which is sin, and because 
He is so strong in His divinity, therefore, even although 
they cannot see just what He will do or how He will 
do it, still in Him, if there be hope at all, in Him their 
hope must be. And so they gather round Him as tha 
crowds used to gather in the lanes of Palestine ; so they 
come to church; so they look up into His face; so they 
turn over the pages of His Bible. Oh, if He could help 
us ! Oh, if this could be the deliverer that we need ! 

Now let us look at what He says to His anxious ques- 
tioner ; what account of Himself He gives ; what He has 
done to Edom ; and especially what mean these blood- 
stains on His robes. 

1. We ask Him, " Who is this ? " and He replies. 
Hear His answer : " I that come in righteousness, mighty 
to save." That reassures us, and is good at the very out- 
set. The Saviour comes in the strength of righteousness. 
Righteousness is at the bottom of all things. Righteous- 
ness is thorough. It is the very spirit of unsparing truth. 
Any reform or salvation of which the power is right- 
eousness must go down to the very root of the trouble ; 
must extenuate and cover over nothing ; must expose 
and convict completely, in order that it may completely 
heal. And this is the power of the salvation of Christ. 
It makes no compromise between the good and the evil, 
between Judah and Edom. Edom must be destroyed, 
not parleyed with ; sin must be beaten down and not 
conciliated ; good must thrive by the defeat and not 
merely by the tolerance of evil. We cannot tell in some 
of those old wars what Edomitish feeling there may have 
been among the Jews ; how many Jews there may have 



52 THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 

been who had some connection with Edom, who rather 
liked the Edomites, and only asked of them that the 
two nations should live in peace together and not fight. 
I cannot know — perhaps you do not know yourself — 
how much there may be in your heart which is so bound 
up with old sin that you do not want it destroyed com- 
pletel}^, that you would have the sin and the goodness 
live on side by side if only they would not fight. It is 
the fighting and not the very presence of sin that troubles 
you. But this Saviour of ours is too thorough for that. 
He cannot help you unless you want Him to beat the 
old enemy down and kill him utterly. He will be the 
negotiator of no low compromise. He wants to set up 
the standard of absolute holiness in the midst of a nature 
all conquered, and totally possessed by Him. Tell me, 
is there any difficulty here? Are you clinging to any 
sin that is so dear to you that you cannot give it up ? 
Let the clear, inexorable claims of this Saviour of ours 
cut down deep and disclose your own heart to yourself, 
for He cannot save you unless He saves you in perfect 
righteousness. 

2. But hear the next question. The questioner won- 
ders, as the Saviour comes nearer, at the strange signs of 
battle and agony upon His robes. " Wherefore art Thou 
red in Thine apparel, and Thy garments like him that 
treadeth in the winefat ? " And the answer is, " I have 
trodden the wine-press;" "I will tread them in mine 
anger and trample them in my fury, and their blood shall 
be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my 
raiment." Behold, it is no holiday monarch coming with 
a bloodless triumph. It has been no pageant of a day, 
this strife with sin. The robes have trailed in the blood. 



THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 63 

The sword is dented with conflict. The power of God 
has struggled with the enemy and subdued him only in 
the agony of strife. My friends, far be it from me to 
undertake to read all the deep mystery that is in this 
picture. Only this I know is the burden and soul of it 
all, this truth, — that sin is a horrible, strong, positive 
thing, and that not even divinity grapples with him and 
subdues him except in strife and pain. What pain may 
mean to the Infinite and Divine, what difficulty may 
)nean to Omnipotence, I cannot tell. Only I know that 
all that they could mean they meant here. This symbol 
of the blood, — and by and by, when we turn from the 
Old Testament to the New, from the prophecy to the ful- 
filment, we find that it was not only the enemy's blood, 
but His own blood too, that stained the victorious de- 
liverer's robes, — this symbol of the blood bears this 
great truth, which has been the power of salvation to 
millions of hearts, and which must make this conqueror 
the Saviour of your heart too, the truth that only in self- 
sacrifice and suffering could even God conquer sin. Sin 
is never so dreadful as when we see the Saviour with 
that blood upon His garments. And the Saviour Him- 
self, surely He is never so dear, never wins so utter and 
so tender a love, as when we see what it has cost Him to 
save us. Out of that love born of His suffering comes 
the new impulse after a holy life ; and so when we stand 
at last purified by the power of grateful obedience, it 
shall be said of us, binding our holiness and escape from 
our sin close to our Lord's struggle with sin for us, that 
we have " washed our robes and made them white in 
the blood of the Lamb." 

3. But He says something more. Not merely He has 



54 THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 

conquered completely and conquered in suffering ; He 
has conquered alone. As any one reads through the 
Gospels he feels how hopeless the attempt would be to 
tell of the loneliness of that life which Jesus lived. " I 
have trodden the wine-press alone, and of the people 
there was none with me. I looked and there was none 
to help. Therefore mine own arm brought salvation." 
He had friends, but we always feel how far off they 
stood from the deepest centre of His heart. He had dis- 
ciples, but they never came into the inner circles of His 
self-knowledge. He had fellow- workers, but they only 
handed round the broken bread and fishes in the mira- 
cle, or ordered the guest chamber on the Passover night. 
They never came into the deepest work of His life. With 
the mysterious suffering that saved the world they had 
nothing to do. It was not only their cowardice, it was 
the necessary solitariness of the task to which He went, 
which caused that when the hands of sin were laid on 
Him to drag Him to the cross, " all His disciples for- 
sook Him and fled." It was a work that He alone could 
do, that He must do alone. And is it not so always ? 
Our brothers may help the work that Christ does in our 
souls in some of its details. They may bring the en- 
couragement of their sympathetic Christian lives. They 
may lift up the hand and point with the finger to where 
the Saviour comes, saying, " Behold the Lamb of God." 
But in all the deep work of salvation itself, in all that 
impulse made up of perception of the perfect holiness 
and gratitude for forgiven sin which draws the soul 
straight and close to the divine heart, — in all that, no 
one has any part but the Lord Himself. Pie conquers 
sin. He brings out victory in His open hand. From His 



THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 65 

hand we take it by the power of prayer, and to Him alone 
we render thanks here and forever. 

4. And yet once more. What was the fruit of this 
victory over Edom which the Seer of Israel discovered 
from his mountain-top ? It set Israel free from continual 
harassing and fear, and gave her a chance to develop along 
the way that God had marked out for her. Freedom ! 
That is the word. It built no cities ; it sowed no fields ; 
it only broke off the burden of that hostile presence and 
bade the chosen nation go free into its destiny. And so 
what is the fruit of the salvation that the divine Saviour 
brings to the souls of men ? It does not finish them at 
once ; it does not fill and stock their lives with heavenly 
richness in a moment. But it does just this. It sets 
them free ; it takes off the load of sin ; it gives us a 
new chance ; it secures forgiveness, and says to the poor 
soul, that has been thinking there was no use of trying to 
stagger on with such a load, Go on; your bui'den is re- 
moved. Go on, go up to the home that you were made 
for, and the life in God. 

And notice that this conqueror who comes, comes 
strong, — " travelling in tlie greatness of His strength." 
He has not left His might behind Him in the struggle. 
He is all ready, with the same strength with which He 
conquered, to enter in and rule and educate the nation 
He has saved. And so the Saviour has not done all when 
He has forgiven you. By the same strength of love and 
patience whicli saved you upon Calvary, He will come 
in, if you will let Him, and train your saved life into per- 
fectness of grace and gloiy. 

So, my dear friend, if you are in earnest I stand and 
point to you the way of life. There is the Saviour, 



56 



THE CONQUEROR FROM EDOM. 



victorious for you. He has conquered sin, so that you 
need not be its servant any longer. Now let Him con- 
quer you by His great love, and so let His victory be com- 
plete. For His iirst victory is all in vain for you and me, 
unless we thank Him for it, and take Him for our King, 
and dedicate our obedient lives to Him, and let Him lead 
us into all the holiness and happiness of His salvation 
here, and yet more hereafter. 



IV. 

KEEPING THE FAITH. 

» 

" I have kept the faith." — 2 Tim. iv. 7. 

This was the satisfaction on which Paul's mind rested 
when he contemplated the close of his earthly work. It 
was almost done. The time of his departure was at 
hand. In this epistle he is almost delegating his mission, 
with the rich lessons of faith and prudence which it had 
taught him, to his favorite disciple ; and as he looks back 
over his life, it is interesting to see where his mind rests, 
and to hear him say with such evident thankfulness and 
hopefulness, " I have kept the faith." What do men think 
of when they come to die ? There must be a great dif- 
ference in the way that different men look back from the 
margin upon the lives that they have finished, and in the 
various things on which they dwell with pleasure. The 
lowest kind of man may merely summon the ghosts of 
his past pleasures to cheat him with the illusion of a still 
present reality ; may dream of doing over again those 
things which it was so pleasant once to do, and think 
what a good time he has had in the world. The man 
whose life has degenerated into mere routine and habit 
spends his old age in going over, even without pleasure, 
the monotonous occupations that have filled his days , 
and the old captain drills his soldiers, and the old clerk 
adds up his columns, as they lie upon their dreary death- 



58 KEEPING THE PAITH. 

beds. But higher men think higher things of their past 
lives. " I have been powerful ; 1 have turned the cur- 
rents, and made the world different." That is a great 
comfort for many a strong man to think of as he dies. 
" I have been useful ; I have made the world better," 
is a much nobler satisfaction. " I have been honored ; 
I have made men regard and love me," is a pleasant 
thought which has made death harder and easier at once 
to many men ; others have looked back into rich fields of 
knowledge through which their path has lain, and said 
rejoicingly and hopefully, " I have learned much ; " while 
others have had no better comfort to lay to their hearts 
than merely, " I have made a great deal of money ; " 
and not a few, weary of life, have laid down their heads 
to die with no profounder thought than just that it was 
over, that at last they had got through. 

I think it may be interesting to see something of the 
position of one who, so different from all of these, looked 
back over his life and described his success, the aspect of 
his eventful career which it was most pleasant for him to 
look at, thus : " I have kept the faith." There are not 
a few of our present every-day questions which such a 
consideration will touch. 

What does St. Paul mean, then, by the faith which he 
has kept ? Is he rejoicing that he has been true to a 
certain scheme of doctrine, or that he has preserved a 
certain temper of soul and spiritual relationship to God ? 
For the term " faith " is a very large one. There can 
be no doubt, I think, that he means both, and that 
the latter meaning is a very deep and important one, as 
we shall see. But this term, " the faith," did signif}^ 
for him, beyond all doubt, a certain group of truths, all 



KEEPING THE FAITH. 59 

bound together by their common unity of source and 
unity of purpose. Paul was too wise and profound not 
to keep this always in sight. That there must be intel- 
lectual conceptions as the base of strong, consistent, and 
effective feeling is a necessity which he continually recog- 
nizes; and the faith which he is thankful to have kept 
is, first of all, that truth which had been made known to 
him and to the Church by God. The first thing, then, 
that strikes us is that when Paul said that he had 
kept the faith, he evidently believed that there was a 
faith to keep. At the present day, many scholars of 
the New Testament, finding very different forms of state- 
ment in the epistles of St. Paul from those which fill the 
four Gospels, and seeming even to find in the epistles 
some doctrines which do not appear to them to be taught, 
even by implication, in the words of Christ, have been 
led to believe that St. Paul made his theology for him- 
self ; that with a strong and very original mind he shaped 
for himself the system of truth which then he taught to 
his disciples, and which thus has passed into the belief 
of the Christian Church. We hear much of a Pauline 
theology. It is a favorite idea. These doctrines are not 
Christ's, but Paul's, stamped with his peculiar character, 
and enforced only by his personal authority. I cannot 
but think that this text of ours, the dying utterance of 
the great apostle, proves very clearly that he had no such 
idea about his belief and teaching. To him the truth 
which he believed was not a doctrine which he had dis- 
covered, but the faith which he had kept. The faitli 
was a body of truth given to him, which he had to 
hold and to use and to apply, but which he had not 
made and was not to improve. lie knew nothing of a 



60 KEEPING THE FAITH. 

Pauline theology. It was the word of Christ which he 
preached. It does not prove that there was not such a 
thing, but it does prove that he knew nothing of it. It 
existed without his consciousness, if it existed at all. 
What he meant to do, what he believed that he had done 
when he died, was not to think out a system which should 
rest upon such proof as he could bring, but merely to hold 
and to transmit a revelation which God had given him. 
Between these two every religious teacher must choose. 
There are schools of thought and there are revelations 
of God. Every teacher must be either a leader in the 
first or a messenger of the second. St. Paul considered 
himself, and boasted that he was, the latter. His own 
personality was there. It colored, but it did not create, 
his truth. Its weight pressed the seal of the faith down 
upon his disciples' hearts, but the device upon the seal 
itself was none of his, — was only God's. This was Paul's 
idea of himself and his work, and he certainly was clear- 
sighted, and understood both himself and his work pretty 
well. 

We want, then, to consider the condition of one who, 
having thus learned and held a positive faith, continues 
to hold it, — holds it to the end. He keeps the faith. 
We need not confine our thought to St. Paul. An old 
man is dying, and as he lets go the things which are 
trivial and accidental to lay hold of what is essential 
and important to him, this is what comes to his mind 
with special satisfaction : " I have kept the faith." The 
things that he believed as a boy he has believed all 
along, in every stage of his growing manhood, and he 
is believing still. This continuous faith gives a unity to 
the life that has seen so many changes. All besides is 



KEEPING THE FAITH. 61 

altered, but that is the same. The boy with his round 
cheek and bright eye, the youth ^Yith his quick imagi- 
nation, the young man with his romance of love, the 
strong mature man who ruled his great business, — you 
can find nothing of these in the feeble figure that lies be- 
fore you, waiting for the end. He can scarcely recognize 
himself as having been either of these. But one strong 
cord of identity runs back, still unbroken, — he is the 
same believer that he has always been. He has kept the 
faith. 

And this suggests that there may be both bad and 
good ways in which a man may utter these words of 
Paul. The bad ways are evident. There is a certain 
sort of identification with our opinions and beliefs which 
brings us in time to*value them simply because they are 
ours, not for their own proved truth. And then there 
is the pride in mere firmness, which is proud of having 
held the same ground for a great many years, and re- 
fuses to desert it, not because the ground is good, but 
because the man is too obstinate to change. Pride and 
obstinacy ! "Where is the faithfulness to a good cause 
which the world has rightly honored, that has not had 
some lurking mixture of these subtle counterfeits ? The 
very martyr at the stake must surely sometimes have 
known that nothing but the fire of his martyrdom could 
finally purge him perfectly of these, and leave only the 
good elements of persistent faith, which are devotion to 
the truth for its own essential value and a gradually- 
acquired thankfulness for the good that the truth in our 
long loyalty to it has done for us. It is these that make 
the persistency of belief reasonable and pure. It is the 
second of these — the gradual sense of what the truth we 



62 KEEPING THE FAITH. 

hold has done for us, the relation which the absolute truth 
has acquired to our personal experience — that makes our 
hold upon it stronger and tighter the longer that we hold 
it, the older that we grow. 

For I think that the first condition of any permanent 
hold on any truth is this, that the truth itself should 
be live enough and large enough to open constantly and 
bring to every new condition through which we pass 
some new experience of itself. The truth that is narrow 
and partial we outgrow ; only the truth that is broad 
and complete grows up with us and can be kept. The 
one is like the clothes of childhood that are cast aside ; 
the other is like the live body that grows up with the 
growing soul and at each stage offers it a fit instrument 
for its work and a fit medium through which to receive 
its education. You must teach your children truth in 
part, but the partial truth you teach them must be true 
and so have in it the essential completeness of all truth, 
or else they will outgrow it and cast it off as hundreds of 
growing children do leave behind the whole well-meant 
but narrowly-conceived religion of their nurseries, as they 
pass out of the nursery-door into the world. 

The true faith which a man has kept up to the end of 
his life must be one that has opened with his growth and 
constantly won new reality and color from his changing 
experience. The old man does believe what the child 
believed ; but how different it is, though still the same. 
It is the field that once held the seed, now waving and 
rustling under the autumn wind with the harvest that 
it holds, yet all the time it has kept the corn. The joy of 
his life has richened his belief. His sorrow has deepened 
it. His doubts have sobered it. His enthusiasms have 



KEEPING THE FAITH. 63 

fired it. His labor has purified it. This is the work 
that life does upon faith. This is the beauty of an old 
man's religion. His doctrines are like the house that he 
has lived in, rich with associations which make it certain 
that he will never move out of it. His doctrines have 
been illustrated and strengthened and endeared by the 
good help they have given to his life. And no doctrine 
that has not done this can be really held up to the end 
with any such vital grasp as will enable us to carry it 
with us through the river and enter with it into the new 
life beyond. 

And again, is it not true that any belief which we 
really keep up to the end of life must at some time have 
become for us a personal conviction, resting upon evi- 
dence of its own ? We get all our notions and especially 
our religious notions, at first, by mere tradition. Some- 
body tells us that this is true, and because we have no 
evidence that it is not, and because we know of nothing 
else to believe, we believe what we are told. But by 
and by the age of pure tradition passes. The capacity 
for evidence arrives ; and what I claim is, that the man 
who does not win some personal conviction of the truth 
of what he holds cannot be truly said to hold it. He 
may still range himself under the banner of the belief 
that he was taught. When men ask him he may say, 
" Tliat is my religion ; " but if, when he is asked why 
he believes it, he can give no better answer than merely 
" I was taught so," he is not a real, he certainly is not 
a reliable, holder of the truth. The evidence may be of 
various kinds, external or internal, of argument or of 
experience. I do not say that every Christian must 
study books, but by some personal witness addressed to 



64 KEEPING THE FAITH. 

that fiiculty wliicli is the receptive faculty in him, — the 
intellect, the conscience, or the heart, — the truth must 
come with conviction or it never really is his truth. There 
is a time when the nature comes of age with reference to 
this whole matter of belief. If there be exceptions, 
if there be those who must live in the region of tradition 
all their days, they are to reasonable men what imbeciles 
and idiots, whom the law keeps all their lives in a con- 
dition of childhood and wardship, are to the young men 
whom it compels at a right age to take the responsibility 
of their own lives. 

All this, of course, has nothing to do with St. Paul, 
because his faith, from the first, rested upon its own evi- 
dence. It did not come to him in childhood from other 
men, but in the full strength of his reasonable manhood 
straight from Christ Himself. He never passed through 
that middle region where tradition and conviction mix. 
His Christian life was like the natural life of Adam, born 
mature, without a childhood ; and so to some extent the 
lives of all the Apostles and early Christians must have 
been. But now almost every life must pass through 
that middle country, and many find it very boisterous 
and dark. It is the land where doubt hangs thick ; the 
time between the moonlight and the sunlight, which is 
the bleakest of the day. When I see what to some 
people seems so inconsistent, a man whose whole heart 
is clinging to a religion at which the head is sorely puz- 
zled, who loves intensely what he yet cannot say that he 
believes, I think I see one whom God is leading through 
this foggy middle land. His love will help him to the 
evidence and meanwhile will hold him from falling till 
the evidence grows cL^ar. Men, believers and unbelievers. 



KEEPING THE FAITH. 65 

from their different points of view, distrust one who is 
in just this state, ask how he can love a truth which he 
cannot say that he believes is true, but after all this 
familiar experience, this condition in which some cer- 
tainly are to whom I speak to-day, verifies the words of 
the old Church Father, which have always been felt to 
be true, that " human things must be known in order to 
be loved, while divine things, on the other hand, must be 
loved in order to be known." 

I know, indeed, how much a merely traditional relig- 
ion will inspire men to do. I know that for a faith 
which is not really theirs, but only what they call it, 
" their fathers' faith," men will dispute and argue, make 
friendships and break them, contribute money, under- 
take great labors, change the whole outward tenor of 
their life. I know that inen will suffer for it. I am 
not sure but they will die to uphold a creed to which 
they were born, and with which their own character for 
firmness and consistency has become involved. All this 
a traditional faith can do. It can do every thing except 
one, and that it can never do. It can never feed a spirit- 
ual life and build a man up in holiness and grace. Be- 
fore it can do that our fathers' faith must first by strong 
personal conviction become ours. 

It is this feeling of the supreme importance of per- 
sonal conviction which has led to a good many strange 
ideas about the religious education of children. You have 
heard people say, perhaps some of you have thought your- 
selves, that it was not right to give children any positive 
religious teaching ; that you must not put into their minds 
what you hold to be the truth, but leave them by and by 

to gather for themselves the convictions which should 

5 



66 KEEPING THE FAITH. 

come to them when they are capable of being convinced. 
It is certainly very much like saying that you ought not 
to feed a child gratuitously in his earliest years, because 
the time will come when he will have to earn his own 
living and to feed himself. You feed him as a child just 
that you may bring him on, and make him ready by and 
by to feed himself. After that, to keep on feeding him 
would do him harm. And so you teach a child religious 
truth, using his faculty of trust in authority, only just 
in order that by and by he may search for himself and re- 
ceive conviction of what is true. After that, to teiich him 
to believe things on your word would do him harm. Any 
other way is blind and disloyal to the facts of life. Life 
is one in many, a unity in manifold diversity. The great 
purpose of life — the shaping of character by truth — 
is to be sought in all the life. There are no wasted hours. 
It must begin in the life's morning and run on till the 
nightfall comes. With the first opening of conscious ex- 
istence, — nay, who can say how long before existence be- 
comes conscious, — this process, the shaping of character by 
truth, begins. In each period of the changing life it may 
change its methods and yet be the same process still. In 
the early life the channel through which truth enters for 
its work is obedient trust. Later it is individual convic- 
tion ; but he mangles the life, and loses its symmetry and 
unity, who breaks off either half or dishonors either chan- 
nel ; who either thinks there can be no religion till the 
mind can understand its grounds, or tries to keep the ma- 
ture mind under the power of traditional ideas of which 
it has received no personal conviction. 

And here I think that, rightly seen, the culture of our 
Church asserts its wisdom. The Church has in herself 



KEEPING THE FAITH. 67 

the very doctrine of tradition. She teaches the child a 
faith that has the warrant of the ages, full of devotion and 
of love. She calls on him to believe doctrines of which 
he cannot be convinced as yet. The tradition, the he- 
reditation of belief, the unity of the human history, are 
ideas very familiar to her, of which she constantly and 
beautifully makes use. And yet she does not disown her 
work of teaching and arguing and convincing. She can- 
not, and yet be true to her mission. She teaches the 
young with the voice of authority ; she addresses the ma- 
ture with the voice of reason. Let her give up the first 
function, and her assemblies would turn into mere socie- 
ties of debate. Let her abandon the second, and they 
must be blighted with some doctrine of infallibility. Her 
baptism receives a child into the traditionary culture, 
and her commemorative Supper is an expression of the 
adult believer's personal conviction of the faith of Christ. 
With such completeness, such constant sense of its unity, 
does the true Christian Ciiurch deal with the human life 
that her Master gives into her care. 

And there is still another feeling, which goes even far- 
ther than this desire to exclude children from positive 
religious teaching. Some people seem to think that it is 
bad for any man to have definitely accepted a religious 
belief in which he proposes to live and die, which he 
never expects to change. It is the loose popular feeling 
against creeds. "Have your creeds," says, in substance, 
one of our teachers, "if you must, but build them like 
birds' nests, to be used only this year," . Such a feeling- 
would make it disreputable for any man to say, more 
than one year hence, " I have kept the faith." To 
Bay it at the close of a lifetime, for all the life, would 



68 KEEPING THE FAITH. 

prove the man to be either insincere or bhndly stupid. 
It is the violent protest against the deadness of tradi- 
tional religion which would substitute for it the galvanic 
life of ever-altering whim. Surely there is something 
at least as blind in insisting upon change as in insisting 
upon permanence. Surely such a teaching utterly unfits 
the mind for the noble search after an absolute truth, 
making it believe either that there is no such thing or 
else that it is unattainable by man. Surely it must re- 
ject the whole idea of a revelation from God to man. 
Surely it must break away the solid ground on which 
alone men can stand to do their work for God or fellow- 
man. For, feel as we may how blindly men have often 
chosen their beliefs, and how ignorantly they have clung 
to them, still we must see that only from the strong 
footing of some truth which they believed, and deemed 
unchangeable, only from the solid ground of some clear 
creed, have men done good strong work in the world. 
Strong action can issue only from strong faith. Only out 
of certainty comes power. I do not think that men con- 
sider how much of all that is dearest to them about God 
and themselves and fellow-man they must abandon, un- 
less they can believe that it is possible and profitable to 
come with the best light they have to some conclusion 
which shall be certainty to them, and then to count that 
settled ; to keep that faith ; not to be forever pulling up 
and examining that root-power of their lives, but, with 
the best cultivation they can give it, to make it blossom 
into every grace, and ripen into every fruit of good activ- 
ity which it is capable of bearing. 

It is not hard, perhaps, to see whence comes the feeling 
that we speak of. It seems to me to be aiming at this, 



KEEPING THE FAITH. 69 

which men are always in danger of forgetting, that any 
truth large enough for one to hold for a lifetime must 
have newer and richer sides to show the fuller-grown nat- 
ure than it could open to the novice who laid hold on it at 
first. He is, indeed, unwise, and almost certainly condemns 
himself to stunted growth, who says that every truth shall 
always seem to him in the future just as it has seemed to 
liim in the past. If he changes, his relations to the most 
external truths must alter. If he grows, the revelations 
of God must seem to him greater, seen from a higher 
stand-point. This is the only true conservatism. Who is 
he that keeps most truly the principles of the fathers of 
our national government, but he who is forever on the 
watch to see in what new and unexpected way those prin- 
ciples must be applied to the full-grown republic which, 
if our fathers saw at all, they saw very far off ? One 
who thoroughly holds the great truth of the Trinity 
would be sorry to think that he should ever cease to hold 
that saci'ed truth, but he would be sorry, too, to think 
that he would always hold it just as he holds it now, and 
that he never would see more deeply into its infinite 
meaning. He who holds the truth of the Atonement is 
sure that he will always hold it, but it will not always be 
as barren to him as now it sometimes seems. Some day, 
if he is better and more spiritual, its holy mystery will 
be to him, not less mysterious, but infinitely fuller of 
spiritual grace and strength than it is to-day. This is an 
expectation which does much for us. It lets progress 
into our lives and yet does not destroy their continuity. 
It repeats in our mental and spiritual natures what is so 
beautifid in our bodies, — the harmony of constant growth 
with unimpaired identity. 



70 KEEPING THE FAITH. 

And this is an expectation which no mere line of death, 
no dark shadow of the grave, can limit. The " knowing 
in part " wliich belongs to this world passes on and is one 
with the " knowing even as also we are known " which is 
to come to us as we stand for an ageless eternity before 
the throne of God. Heaven is not to sweep our truths 
away, but only to turn them till we see their glory, to 
open them till we see their truth, and to unveil our eyes 
till for the first time we shall really see them. You teach 
your little child some simplest truth about the Saviour. 
And the child dies and goes to heaven, and knowledge 
comes into the glorified mind in unknown ways. God is 
its teacher. Love is its education. Unguessed works for 
the Father's glory develop and enrich it. It sees Christ 
and learns more and more of Him to all eternity, and yet 
to all eternity your child, looking back over the richness 
of the knowledge that has come, sees that it all is one 
with that first truth learned at your knee, and sums up all 
eternity in this one confession, this one tribute of thank- 
fulness to God, — "I have kept the faith." 

And now have we not i-eached some idea of the kind of 
faith which it is possible for a man to keep ? What sort 
of a creed may one hold and expect to hold it always, live 
in it, die in it, and carry it even to the life beyond ? In 
the first place, it must be a creed broad enough to allow 
the man to grow within it, to contain and to supply his 
ever-developing mind and character. It will not be a 
creed burdened with many details. It will consist of large 
truths and principles, capable of ever-varying applications 
to ever-varying life. So only can it be clear, strong, pos- 
itive, and yet leave the soul free to grow within it, nay, 
feed the soul richly and minister to its gi'owth. The men 



KEEPING THE FAITH. 71 

of narrowest ideas are the most changeable or the most 
obstinate of men. If their minds are active, they are 
changeable, always shifting one narrow position for an- 
other. If their minds are sluggish, they are obstinate, 
doggedly clinging to the splinter of truth on which they 
have been wrecked. But the true Christian believer says, 
with David, " Thou hast set my feet in a large room ; " 
and in tlie large truth where his Lord has put him, he 
abides, finding abundant space to live his life and grow 
his growth. 

And the second characteristic of the faith that can be 
kept will be its evidence, its proved truth. It will not 
be a mere aggregation of chance opinions. The reason 
why a great many people seem to be always changing 
their faith is that they never really have any faith. They 
have indeed what they call a faith, and are often very 
positive about it. They have gathered together a num- 
ber of opinions and fancies, often very ill-considered, 
which they say that they believe, using the deep and 
sacred word for a very superficial and frivolous action of 
their wills. They no more have a faith than the city 
vagrant has a home who sleeps upon a different door- 
step every night. And yet he does sleep somewhere 
every night ; and so these wanderers among the creeds at 
each given moment are believing something, although 
that something is forever altering. Wo do not prop- 
erly believe what we only think. A thousand specula- 
tions come into our heads, and our minds dwell upon 
them, which are not to be therefore put into our creed, 
however plausible they seem. Our creed, our credo, any- 
thing which we call by such a sacred name, is not what 
we have thought, but what our Lord has told us. The 



72 KEEPING THE FAITH. 

true creed must come down from above and not out from 
within. Have your opinions always, but do not bind 
yourself to them. Call your opinions your creed, and 
you will change it every week. Make your creed simply 
and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you may 
keep it to the end. This is the difference between the 
hundreds of long, detailed confessions of many differing 
sects, overloaded with the minute speculations of good 
men, which take in and dismiss their believers like the 
nightly lodgers of an eastern caravansary, and the short 
scriptural creed of the church universal, into which souls 
come seeking rest and strength, and live in it as in a 
home, and go no more out forever. 

And then the third quality of a creed that a man may 
keep up to the end is that it is a creed capable of being 
turned into action. A mere speculation, however true it 
be, I think you never can be sure that the mind will hold. 
The faith which you keep must be a faith that demands 
obedience, and you can keep it only by obeying it. Are 
not both of these true ? Those parts of religion which are 
purely speculative, if indeed such mere speculation is part 
of religion at all, are the parts in which men most often 
and most easily change. A hundred men change their 
views of abstract truth for one who alters his conviction 
of practical duty. The one may be changed and nothing 
suffers ; a change in the other alters the whole life. 

Look at two men holding the same truth, — the truth 
of the Trinity, for instance. To one it presents itself 
always as a doctrine to be learned, to the other as a law 
to be obeyed. One's view of it is alwaj^s theoretical, the 
other's always practical. They both believe it, but one 
asserts it, demonstrates it, reasons about it. The other 



KEEPING THE FAITH. 73 

lives by it. Which is the true believer ? I can conceive of 
the first man losing his belief and yet going on much the 
same. Convince him witli a specious argument and he 
will let it drop, and, except that he talks of it no longer, 
nobody will know the difference. But take the truth of 
the Divine Father, the Divine Saviour, the Divine Com- 
forter, out of the other's life, and all is gone. Duty no 
longer has a zest, nor prayer an object, nor grief a con- 
solation. The whole life falls to pieces when its truth is 
gone. Is not this last the man who will keep the faith ? 
Practical obedience is the " deepness of earth " of the 
Lord's parable in which the sower's seed is caught and 
rooted, and held fast, and saved from the fowls of the 
wayside and the scorching sun of the stony places. . 

Breadth, Positive Evidence, Practicalness, — these, 
then, must be the characteristics of the creed which a 
man expects to live in and die in. 

I have spoken, in illustration of what I have been say- 
ing, about the truth of the Trinity. Do you remember 
the Collect which our Church has appointed for Trinity 
Sunday ? It bears upon our subject. " Almighty and 
Everlasting God," it prays, " who hast given unto us Thy 
servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to ac- 
knowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the 
power of the divine Majesty to worship the Unity; we be- 
seech Thee that Thou wouldest keep us steadfast in this 
faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities, who 
livest and reignest, one God, world without end. Amen." 
Now what does that Collect pray for with its solemn and 
sonorous words ? Does it simply ask God to make us 
obstinate and firm ? Does it implore Him to keep away 
from our feeble reasons any strong arguments that might 



74 KEEPING THE FAITH. 

convince us that the doctrine of the Trinity is not true ? 
Is it the cry of cowardice, or of self-indulgent indolence 
that dreads to be disturbed ? I think our study must 
have taught us something more than this. He who prays 
for an end prays for the necessary means. He who 
prays for the preservation of his faith in the Trinity 
prays that his faith in the Trinity may be such that it 
can be preserved. Then comes in all that we have said. 
He prays that his faith in the Trinity may be broad, 
not full of minute definitions of the method of the divine 
existence, which are impertinent and iiTeverent, and may 
prove untenable, but simply resting on the great fact of 
the divinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, which shall grow 
clearer and richer to him as he grows stronger under it. 
He prays that his Faith in the Trinity may have positive 
evidence, that it may rest on God's Word and not on his 
own opinion, and so again that all mere theories about 
it, which are only his own opinion, may be separated 
from the substance of his faith. He prays that his faith 
in the Trinity may be practical, continually making him 
strong and active in the manifold live duties that fill all 
his life. He prays for largeness of thought, for honesty 
and thoroughness of purpose, for earnestness of work, 
when he prays that God will keep him steadfast in the 
faith of the eternal Trinity. It is surely a prayer for 
man to pray and for God to hear. 

Or take the constant exhortations that are made to 
people from the Christian pulpits to hold fast their faith. 
What do tliey mean ? Are they mere pleas for ob- 
stinacy ? Do they beg the people to close their ears to 
argument, to keep out of the way of light, to dread and 
run away from the honest man who comes to meet them 



KEEPING THE FAITH. 75 

with a faith different from theirs, for fear that they 
should be converted and lose the faith of their fathers ? 
Are thousands of ministers preaching doctrinal discourses 
this Sunday morning, — Romanist, Baptist, Methodist, 
Unitarian, Episcopalian, — each preaching to his own con- 
gregation and begging them at all hazards to hold fast 
their faith, each busy building the fences of his sheep-fold 
a little higher and warning his flock of the danger of look- 
ing over ? That were pitiful enough. I would, indeed, 
that ministers and people both understood what kind of 
faith alone it is that can be kept. He who exhorts to an 
end exhorts to the necessary means. He who exhorts 
men to keep their faith exhorts them to make their faith 
broad, solid, practical, so that it can be kept. Of that 
exhortation there cannot be too much. Let all ministers 
utter that exhortation and all people hear it, and speedily 
the " Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints," 
which we believe in, must be seen grandly issuing from 
this tumult of conflicting sects as out of a multitude of 
narrow, shallow, brawling mountain-streams issues by 
and by the broad, deep, and effective river. This is what 
we really preach, or ought to. This is what I preach to 
you to-day. Not, " Be obstinate, be quarrelsome, be 
fighters for your faith," but, " Be wide, be thorough, be 
workers in your faith, and so keep it to the end." 

How clear it is, then, that St. Paul's words may mean 
very differently in the mouths of different men. When 
you find a man of eighty professing to believe still what 
he -believed at twenty, it may signify something very bad 
or very good. It may mean death or life. It may mean 
that long ago he gave up thinking and studying and 
feeling, and is going along through life, and by and by 



76 KEEPING THE FAITH. 

is going out of life, to God, with nothing but an old 
withered handful of grass and flowers, dead long since, 
which he still thinks precious, because they were fresh 
and live when he picked them sixty years ago. But he 
has held thera in his hands instead of planting them into 
his life, and they are dead. He goes, saying, "I have 
kept the faith ; " but he has no more kept it than the 
tomb that keeps the body keeps the man. But there is 
another old man who believes still his boyhood's creed. 
The things that were so dear to him at first have grown 
dearer, year by year. The joy and grief of life, like sun- 
shine and rain, have worked together to ripen the well 
planted field. He said the creed this morning, and it 
was truer to him than on the day when he was confirmed. 
All life has illustrated it, and now as death draws near 
he sees how through death's window eternity casts into 
it light and meaning that it never had before. He will 
go, saying, " I have kept the faith," and hold it up really 
still green and vigorous before God ; and as God takes 
it and plants it in the richer soil of the eternal life 
His words of benediction will descend, " Well done, good 
and faithful servant ; thou hast been faithful in these few 
things, enter into my joy, and keep thy faith there still 
forever." Such be our constant saying of our creed, our 
steadfast keeping of the faith. 

I said, when I began, that this meaning of the term, 
the faith, which made it signify a certain scheme of 
doctrine, was only a part of the meaning of St. Paul. . I 
meant to speak of the other meaning, which I am not 
sure was not more prominent in his mind, the personal 
loyalty to Christ which had been the joy and law and 
inspiration of his life. But I have dwelt so long upon 



KEEFIKG THE FAITH. 77 

the first meaning that I have left no time for the other. 
I can only suggest it to you, and I ought not to omit it 
altogether. When Paul the aged said, " I have kept the 
faith," he was remembering how, from the time his Mas- 
ter called him, he had served that Master all his days. 
As he wrote it he must have seen Damascus and the open 
sky again. The voice of Jesus must have been once more 
in his ears. From that time on he had served and loved 
his Lord. " What wilt Thou have me to do ? " had been 
the question of all his life. 

His faith in Christ he had kept only by obedience to 
Christ. If it is impossible, as we have said, to keep a 
conviction, still more is it impossible to keep a feeling, a 
personal devotion, without setting it into action. You 
can keep a faith only as you keep a plant, by rooting it 
into your life and making it grow there. So it under- 
goes the changes that belong to growth and yet continues 
still the same. But this meaning of our text I can only 
point out to-day, and at some other time we may deal 
with it more fully. 

It was a noble end certainly. Men lose their love and 
trust and hope, as they grow old. Here was a man who 
kept them all fresh to the last. Men cease to have strong 
convictions, and grow cynical or careless. Here was a 
man who believed more, and not less, as he knew more 
of God, and of himself, and of the world. His old age did' 
not come creeping into port, a wreck, with broken masts 
and rudder gone, but full-sailed still, and strong for other 
voyages in other seas. We are sure that his was the old 
age God loves to see ; that the careless and the hope- 
less and the faithless are the failures. To such men as 
Paul alone is God's promise to David fulfilled: "With 
long life will I satisfy him and shoAv him my salvation." 



V. 

THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 

" Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence from the pride of 
man. Thou shalt keep them secretly in a pavilion from the strife of 
tongues." — Psalm xxxi. 20. 

These are great words surely. They are an expres- 
sion of David's confidence in God's power and will to 
hide His people in Himself. They are a promise of per- 
fect security in God for the man who fears and trusts 
in Him. He is to be hid from " the pride of men," and 
from "the strife of tongues." I suppose that by these 
phrases we may understand the whole of that cruel and 
disturbing interference of one man's life with another's, 
which may take such an endless variety of forms. As 
it troubled David, it took the form of violent opposition, 
of malignant persecution ; but it would limit our Bible 
far too much, if we thought that that was the only form 
of man's inhumanity to man from which it was promised 
that man might find refuge in his God. " From the 
pride of man," David says. Whenever the arrogance and 
selfishness of one man crowds and tramples upon the 
rights or the growth of another ; whenever one man's des- 
potic nature overrides the people about him and seems to 
leave them no chance, the crowded and wronged nature 
may flee to God and find a refuge there. And " the 
strife of tongues " — whenever the mere turmoil and con- 



THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 79 

fusion of the world become intolerable ; whenever a man's 
own personal life and conscience are being swamped and 
lost in the ocean of debate and quarrel, for him, too, the 
life of God is open, and he may go and hide himself there 
and be safe from it all. It is a great promise, for as we 
go on in life are we not often conscious that instead of 
getting the best out of our fellow-men we are really get- 
ting the worst ? Instead of the continual activity of their 
life around us feeding our life and nourishing it with its 
own vitality, this tumult of living, this strife of tongues, 
is always disowning and deadening and dissipating our 
personal faith and character and peace. Again I say, the 
form of the intrusion, the invasion of our lives, differs 
continually. We need not wait till some Saul is hunting 
us up and down the land before we take the Psalm of 
David to ourselves. To him it represented daily per- 
plexity and fear. He was always insulted and in dan- 
ger. He was always watching from the hill-tops to see 
whether his enemy was in sight. He was always listen- 
ing to hear the voices of his enemies borne on the wind, 
and running like a frightened deer to hide himself in 
some dark ravine. We know nothing of all that. Our 
life is peaceable enough ; but yet everywhere there is the 
arrogant presence of the pride of man, and the disturbing 
tumult of the strife of tongues. The abuse and fault- 
finding and frivolousness, the foolisli quarrellings, this 
everlasting touching of one life upon another, this put- 
ting up of artificial standards and then watching to see 
how everybody meets them, tliis continual criticising and 
keeping account of another's conduct, all this waste of 
force and time that comes of the perfectly unmeaning 
strifes of social ambition, of business rivalry, of foolish 



80 THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 

sensitiveness, into which we throw all our soul, and which 
is always tossing about in distress, and trying to drowu 
the soul that we throw into it, — from these we need a 
refuge as strong as David needed from his enemies. 
Who of us can look back over his life and not feel that 
in some form or other these words, " the pride of man 
and the strife of tongues," describe forces which have 
been disturbing and hindering the peace and growth of 
his own character and life? Of how much of our best 
society they seem to be the exact description ; of how 
many heartless houses filled with a poor pretence of so- 
cial life, David's words tell the whole story. " The pride 
of man and the strife of tongues," the lack of humility, 
the lack of love, the lack of peace ! To live in such a 
world, and yet to keep a soul in us at all, is very hard. 
We must have something under and beyond such a woi-ld 
to flee to to renew our life, to really recreate ourselves. 
That security and recreation of our life cannot come ex- 
cept in the source from which our life first came. We 
must go back to God. Let us speak to-day of this resort 
of the human soul to God when it feels its danger of be- 
ing swamped and lost in the tumult of the world and the 
strife of tongues. The secrecy and safety of the life of 
the believer who is kept in God. 

But first, before we speak of the refuge which God 
offers, let us see what man tries to do for himself. There 
are two different attitudes which almost all men take 
towards this tendency of the life about us to swallow 
up and drown our personality. It is strange to see how, 
long before they come to middle age, almost all men, ex- 
cept the lowest and the highest, all men of strong char- 
acter who have not reached some religious conception of 



THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 81 

their true relations to the world, have either become de- 
fiant of the world, setting themselves in obtrusive inde- 
pendence against its claims, or else have tried in some 
way to withdraw themselves from it and let the world 
go its way, determined that they will not be sacrificed 
to its importunate demand. Surely we know both kinds 
of men. One man, seeing how the conventionalities of 
society and the tumult of the world are always trying to 
break him down, to compel him to fall into the mill of 
its routine, and to crush liis personal chaiacter between 
its wheels, rebels, defies the world, becomes some kind of 
social outlaw, and does outrageous things to show that he 
will not be crushed, that he keeps, and means to keep, his 
independence and originality unbroken. Another man, 
equally weary and impatient with the world's endeavors 
to absorb him, draws himself back, shuts himself in, at- 
tempts some of those forms of hermit life which our civ- 
ilization still leaves possible, and affects to give up all 
relations to a world whose life seems to him all emptiness 
and noise. We have all seen both kinds of mem Nay, 
who of us has not felt in himself the temptation to do 
both these things at different moments of his life. The 
impulse to be defiant and the impulse to withdraw our- 
selves, both come to us in different moods. We will dare 
the world to its face and tell it to do its worst, for we are 
not afraid of it with all its wretched prescriptions, and 
false standards, and endless clatter of gossiping criticism. 
That is one spirit. We will let the world go its way, 
and we will go ours. We will live a life of our own out- 
side of the quarrels and contentions of men. That is the 
other spirit. We know them both, and we know that 

both are bad. We know that the first makes a man hard 
6 



82 THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 

and brutal, and the second makes a man sefish and self- 
conceited.' We know good human material that has been 
ruined in each of these two ways, and so we want to beg 
any young man who seems to be getting into the power 
of either spirit, to stop and see if there is not something 
better than either ; some nobler refuge than himself from 
"the pride of man and the strife of tongues." 

It is good to see how God comes and offers Himself, 
just here, to the human soul. We do not see yet how 
He can help iis, but instinctively we are sure that if He 
really is God, He must have some help to give us here. 
He says, " In the secret of my Presence I will hide you." 
Have you not seen often how jealous a father can be of 
the privileges of his own love ? Would not any of you be 
angry if a child of yours went about asking other people 
for the bread which it was your place to provide for him, 
begging at other men's doors when your table was spread 
with his dinner ? That is just the feeling with which, all 
through the Bible, God is always chiding men for going 
to other* to ask, or for seeking in themselves that refuge 
and peace which it is the prerogative of His Fatherhood 
to bestow. It is one of the most touching presentations 
of the Deity. It is the one which Christ, the God incar- 
nate, made most manifest. " How can you, my children, 
be in trouble and want," He says, " and not first of all, 
instantly, turn to your Father ? " " Ye will not come 
to me that ye might have life." It appeals to us very 
closely when we learn that God is even more jealous of 
His love than of His honor. 

Christianity is the bringing of God to man, and of 
man to God. We shall go on then, after these general 
suggestions, to see how it is that in Christianity the 



THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 83 

refuge of God is thrown wide open to men who are tired 
with, and who feel the danger of the world. Thousands 
of Christians have found the refuge who never asked the 
question, who simply were drawn into the open door by 
irresistible attraction ; but if we can see how it is that 
Christianity gives us what we want it will make it more 
real, and so more useful to us. I think there is a three- 
fold answer to our question. I think that the release and 
refuge of Christianity consists in the way it brings the 
soul first into communion with God, second into con- 
sciousness of itself, and third into a just value of the 
world. Let us look at each of these. 

1. We will try first to understand how the soul finds 
refuge in communion with God. Of all the deep phrases 
in the Bible, where can we find one deeper or more 
beautiful than this of David in my text, " Thou wilt 
keep him in the secret of thy presence." The very 
words are full of peace before we hardly touch them to 
open their meaning. But their meaning is deeper the 
more we study it. They mean that when a man is spirit- 
ually conscious of the presence of God it secludes and 
separates him from every other presence. Can we un- 
derstand that ? You go into a room full of people, and 
the tumult of tongues is all about you. You are bewil- 
dered and distracted. In the ordinary" language of society, 
which sometimes hits the truth of its own condition right- 
ly, you " feel lost." You lose yourself in the presence of 
so many people. They all seem to take hold of you, and 
claim some part of you, whether they speak to you oi' 
not. You are lost in the crowd. You are merely part of 
the tumult. But by and by you meet your best friend 
there; somebody whose life is your life ; somebody whom 



84 THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 

you sincerely love and trust ; somebody who thoroughly 
satisfies you, and, by the contact of his nature, makes 
your taste and brain and heart and conscience work at 
their very best. As you draw near to him it* seems as if 
you drew away from all the other people. As he takes 
hold of you, he seems to claim you and they let you 
go. The worry and vexation of the crowd sink away 
as he begins to talk with you, and you understand one 
another. By and by you have forgotten that all those 
other men are talking around you. You have escaped 
from the strife of tongues. You are absorbed in him. 
He has hid you in the secret of his presence. Sup- 
pose that St. John should come and talk with you, or 
be at your side without a word in the midst of the wild- 
est of our social Babels. Would he not bring his peace 
with him ? Would you not let every one else go, and 
be alone with him, even in all the crowd ? Would he not 
hide you in the secret of his presence ? And now if it is 
possible, instead of your best friend, instead of the great 
disciple, for God Himself to be with you, so that His 
presence is real, so that He lets you understand His 
thoughts and lets you know that He understands yours, 
so that there is a true sympathy between you and 
Him, if mere vision and hearing are not necessary to 
the Divine company, and as close to you — nay, infi- 
nitely closer — than the men who crowd you round, and 
whose voices are in your ears, the unseen God is truly 
with you, what then ? Can any tumult of those men 
distress you ? Can their unfairness anger you ? You 
hear them blaming you ; you hear them praising you. 
Does either make a tumult in your soul ? They ask you 
flippant questions ; they give you flippant advice. Does 



THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 85 

either distress you ? You are with them, and yet you 
are alone with Him. They parade their foolish vanities 
before you, and you hardly see them. It is as if a bright 
fly fluttered its impertinent finery between you and the 
west, when you were looking at a gorgeous sunset. He 
has blinded you to all besides Himself. He has " hid 
you in the secret of His presence from the pride of 
men." 

This gives the very simplest notion of the meaning. 
Now we suppose that this becomes habitual, the constant 
temper and condition of a life. We suppose this friendly 
meeting with one who interests you thoroughly to pass 
into a friendship, pure, continual, devoted. If not in 
bodily presence, still in thought and sympathy, our friend 
is always with us. We always judge ourselves by his 
standard. We think what he would like or what he 
would condemn; we appeal even in his absence to his 
approbation. Is not the protection which we saw given 
to a man by his friend's company for an hour while they 
talked together, extended now over all his life. He has 
always a refuge from the cavils and fault-findings, the 
ridicule and misunderstanding of his fellows. There is 
one who understands him and who does not laugh at 
him. There is one whom if he pleases and satisfies, the 
rest may go their way. Across his life now may blow 
the most cruel winds of slander and they cannot touch 
him. His friend has hid him in the secret of his unseen 
presence, and there he grows up into fearlessness and 
conscientiousness and peace. This is the separating and 
liberating power of a truly great friendship. Happy is 
the young man to whom it is given early in life ! happy 
because of the safety and growth which it brings to him. 



^Q THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 

happy because of the manifold petty slaveries from 
which it frees him. The most perfect picture of such a 
hiding of one being in the presence of another is in the 
serenity of a child's life, held and comprehended, as it 
were, in the father's. How fearless a child is. How he 
goes among men looking them bravely in the face as if 
they could not harm him, so easily superior to the anxi- 
eties which are fretting away their lives. It is because 
his life rests so completely on his father's life that he 
is able to be so supremely independent of other people. 
The orphan child is timid and distrustful and servile. 
He has no anchor, and so every wave is a thing to fear 
and he runs before it. His poor little unprotected life is 
exposed without the blessed hiding of the secret of that 
presence which God mercifully closes around almost every 
life that it may grow its earliest growth in peace. 

Do not these illustrations, then, at least suggest, — for 
it is almost impossible to tell many of the highest things 
except by mere suggestion, — do they not suggest how 
that which we saw occasional in the Christian's life may 
there, too, become constant, and a man live in such con- 
tinual consciousness of God, such a constant desire to 
please Him, such a constant study of what will please 
Him : in a word, how a man may live so continually in 
God's presence that the presences of other men may be 
shut out, their vexing voices may not vex him ? right in 
the midst of all the strife of voices there may be perfect 
peace with him. There is something very striking in 
seeing how this same feeling has attached to the event 
of these Christmas Days, the coming of God into the 
world's life when Christ was born. What is the whole 
idea of peace that is so clearly associated with that event 



THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 87 

from the time that the angels sang of it to the shepherds ? 
Is it not this same thought of the absorption of all the 
world in its present God ? Is it not the promise that 
when that presence shall be perfectly, spiritually, realized, 
men shall be so taken up in serving Him that they shall 
have no time or wish to fight with one another ? and in 
the farthest distance we can see no other hope of uni- 
versal peace but that. This is the spiritual truth which 
lay at the bottom of that old idea, which is not wanting 
either in historical truth, the idea that at the time of 
the nativity there was a wonderfully wide-spread peace 
throughout the world, and that the Temple of War was 
shut. This is what Milton sings so splendidly : — 

" No war or battle's sound 
Was heard the world around, 
The idle spear and shield were high up hung ; 
The hooked chariot stood 
Unstained with hostile blood, 
The trumpet spake not to the armed throng; 
And kings sate still with awful eye 
As if they surely knew their sovereign Lord was nigh." 

It was the typical and prophetic keeping of the world 
secretly in God's pavilion from the strife of tongues. 

When we seek for individual illustrations of what we 
are describing, I think we understand it perfectly by 
looking at our Lord's apostles. Those men who left 
their boats to follow Him must have heard many an 
angry and scornful word in their old haunts, along the 
streets of Bethsaida, and among the boatmen on the 
Lake, many a flippant discussion of their Master's 
character, many a contemptuous comment on their own 
delusion. Can you conceive of their minding it as they 
walked with Jesus ? He hid tliem from it in the secret 



88 THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 

of His presence. Not merely at the last when He came 
in upon them where the door was shut, and held out His 
scarred hands in benediction. Not only then, but during 
all His life with them, He really had been saying, " My 
peace I give unto you." We cannot picture to ourselves 
those first disciples living in Christ's presence and yet 
forever vexed and worried at the foolish things men 
said about Him. But with us modern disciples how 
different it is. We too believe in Jesus and try to live 
with Him. How is it that a flippant toss of skeptical 
smartness about Him, or a sneer at our folly in making 
Him our Master, lays hold of and stings us so, sends us 
home anxious, puzzled, and worried ? We are not wholly 
hidden from the strife of tongues. It must be that we 
are not completely in the secret of His presence. We 
are not there constantly enough. There are moments, 
times when we are praying, times when in sorrow His 
sympathy is like life to us, when there is not the tongue 
so rude and bitter that it could ruffle the rest of our souls 
in Him ; times when nothing that man could say would 
frighten or depress us. At such times we learn what it 
is to be thoroughly with Him, and understand what a 
guarded and safe life it must be to be^ hidden there 
always. Such times are like the Transfiguration, and we 
feel as Simon Peter felt. 

2. This, then, is the directest meaning of our text. We 
have all sometimes felt, P think, a sense of safety and 
seclusion, as if a great thick door shut between us and 
the ordinary frets and misunderstandings of our life, 
when we appealed to the secret knowledge of one an- 
other that lay between our soul and God's in those great 
words of our Communion Collect : " Almighty God, unto 



THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 89 

whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from 
whom no secrets are hid." We have felt, when we said 
those words, as Noah must have felt when, in the phrase 
of Genesis, God "■ shut him in " to the Ark, and he heard 
the deluge roaring outside and was safe. This is what 
I wanted especially to speak of, but I mentioned two 
other elements in the work which Christianity does to 
secure the safety of the soul from the pride of man and 
the strife of tongues, besides this great work of making 
God more real, more really present to it. One of these 
was the work of a true Christian faith in developing 
and strengthening individuality in each of us. The 
reason why the talk of people about us, their pride and 
arrogance, their intrusion upon our life hurts us so, gives 
us so much pain, and does us so much harm, is the weak- 
ness of our own sense of personality. We go about ex- 
posed like those unhappy creatures that have no shell, 
and are soft and open to wounds on every side. Take 
your ordinary man to whom no clear idea of himself has 
ever dawned, no notion of something specific that he is 
to do, something clear and peculiar that he is to be, and 
is not that poor creature, the sort of man whom you see 
by the hundred all around us, too plentiful for us to 
think how pitiable they really are, — is not he just the 
man to be the victim of the strife of tongues ? With no 
strong personal convictions he is always listening anx- 
iously to hear what the crowd says is right, or what 
society says is manly. He is forever trying to make out 
in the hubbub of voices who it is that the majority are 
cheering for. If he heai's any of the great voices find 
fault with what he has done, it stabs him like a dagger. 
If he hears somebody idly laugh at what lie culls his 



90 THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 

creed it throws him off his unstable standing ground and 
he is floundering in skepticism. His weak jelly-like life 
is torn by everything it touches as it drifts. Now the 
first thing that a Christian faith does for such a man 
is to emphasize his individuality. I mean, of course, a 
real true Christian faith and not the conventional coun- 
terfeits of Christianity, which often deaden instead of 
quickening the sense of personality. A true Christian 
faith starts with the truth of a personal redemption and 
leads the man up to personal duties. It takes this poor 
indistinguishable atom and says to him : " God knows 
3'^ou. To Him you are not only one of the race ; He 
knows you separately ; He made you separately. His 
Son died for you, and there is in you that which, in some 
way which belongs to you alone, can glorify Him. What 
are you doing in this feeble unconscientious life ? Have 
you never heard of such a thing as responsibility ? Get 
up ; repent. Come to God. Get the pattern of your 
life from Him, and then go about your work and be 
yourself." If the man is really a Christian he hears 
that summons, and it is the birth of a true personality, 
of the real sense of himself in him. It is a revelation. 
Behind him opens the long vista of God's care, back to 
the eternity in which God bore in His infinite knowledge 
the thought of such a life as his. Before him opens the 
destiny of a soul for which all through eternity its own 
character must freely decree its life. And then both 
past and future pour down their light on the present, 
and he sees what there is for him to be doing right here 
and now ; and when he takes up his work and does it, he 
can no more be frightened out of it than the man to 
whom Jesus had given his bed to carry from Bethesda 



THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 91 

up the street to his own house could have been scared 
by all the curious gaping of the crowd, and driven 
back to the dreary place under the porches where he 
had lain for thirty-eight long years. This is the way in 
which men come to do their own works. This is the 
way in which men come to take up unpopular tasks and 
do things which everybody about them misunderstands 
and depreciates, with a perfectly undisturbed compla- 
cency and quiet. There are duties lying around us un- 
done now, — things which men call quixotic and laugh 
if anybody suggests that they may be done some dsij ; 
but as sure as it is desirable that the thing should be 
done, some day a man will come to do it, a man who will 
say with Jesus, " For this cause was I born and for this 
cause came I into the world ; " and that assurance will 
make it very easy for him to disregard the ridicule and 
stolid criticism that is sure to greet him when he comes 
and undertakes his task. It Avill be as if there had been 
dug up in some old land a broken arm of mai'ble which 
would fit nothing and lay about neglected and despised ; 
but some day or other men digging a little deeper found 
the statue that the arm belonged to, and immediately 
the statue claimed it, and it became intelligible and 
beautiful when it was set in its true place. 

3. The third element of the freedom which Christianity 
gave to its servants was in the value that it taught them 
to place upon the talk of the world, u^Jon what David 
calls.the " strife of tongues." I have already suggested 
this, but it has one or two other points of view which 
seem to me helpful. I think one of the strangest things 
to a man who has really come to a knowledge and service 
of the Saviour is to look back to his own old life, and see 



92 THE SOUL'S EEFUGE IN GOD. 

how superficial it appears. He used to be forever passing 
off-hand opinions about what people all around him did, 
and used to expect, in his easy way, that those opinions 
of his would really have some weight with the men upon 
whose conduct he made his comments. Now he sees 
how superficial all those judgments were. Now he sees 
how utterly destitute he was of any of that serious 
sympathy which is the only thing that can really jus- 
tify us in forming judgments about one another, or giv- 
ing one another advice. Nay, he sees more than this : he 
sees that he really cared very little when he pronounced 
those opinions in such judicial style, and that the most 
profoundly foolish thing that any neighbor of his, who 
had Ideally considered thoughtfully a plan of action, could 
liave done would have been to put his well-considered 
plan aside because of such cheap and thoughtless criti- 
cism as he poured out upon it. Now it seems to me that 
this sight of the superficialness of our own judgments of 
others, the way in which we have often pronounced 
solemn-sounding verdicts which really meant nothing, and 
uttered cheap ridicule which we should have despised the 
man if he had minded, gives us very often a startling 
sense of what a superficial thing this criticism is that 
comes to us from our brethren of which we make so much 
and to which we are always trimming our action. I am 
just going to do something which I have clearly made up 
my mind to do, and some friend passing by catches sight 
of me, standing with the tools all in my hands, and- on a 
mere momentary impulse he cries out, " What a fool you 
are to do that ! " and so passes on, and has forgotten me 
and my plan in a moment. And yet it is just that sort of 
taunt, or the fear of it, which has blighted many a sweet 



THE SOUL'S EEFUGE IN GOD. 93 

and healthful impulse in the bud. I have only to think 
how often I have said such things, and meant nothing by 
them. I have only to remember how often I have seemed 
to think that my friend's doing a certain thing was the 
most ridiculous action in all the world, when really I was 
speaking only from the instant's whim, and cared very 
little whether lie did it or not, to understand that this 
man's sneer means probably no more than mine meant ; 
that he does not really care, and would, no doubt, be 
much surprised if he should know that his small jeer had 
turned me from my purpose. It is good for us often to 
know how superficial, how lightly made, how soon for- 
gotten are the judgments of our brethren which sound so 
solemn, and which tyrannize over us so. Such a feeling 
sets us free, and makes us independent. Be sure that 
you may feel that about any cruel criticism that is ham- 
pering you, and may cast it aside and forget it and go 
your way. The man who made it has probably forgotten 
it long ago. 

There is one other thing more helpful than this, and 
that is the way in which Christianity, by putting us into 
true relations to our fellow-men, saves us from falling 
into false relations to them. This seems to me to be the 
principle on which Christianity works for the redemption 
of society. If I wanted to save a young man from being 
a mere slave of other people's opinions, trying to win their 
applause, trying to escape their censure, I should be 
sure of succeeding if I could make him really go to 
work for those people's benefit, really desire to do them 
good, and really desire to avert harm from them. There 
is no escape from the slavery of other men like that which 
comes of the intelligent and earnest service of other men. 



94 THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 

Jesus said, " Call no man your master," and yet he said, 
" Let him that is chief among you be your servant." 
And, think of it ! Who is the man that you have known 
who most completely served the community he lived in ? 
Remember tlie man who in the magistrate's chair, or in 
the teacher's desk, in the council room, or in the court- 
room, or in the church, labored most earnestly for the peo- 
ple's good. Was not he the very man who was most inde- 
pendent of the people's whims ? Was he not the last man 
to be softened by their applause, or vexed or frightened 
by their anger ? Think of Paul. Did not his very toil for 
men's salvation lift him above, and make him indifferent 
to men's easy praise or blame ? And I am sure of this, 
that an}^ man of you who finds in himself an over-sensitive- 
ness to what people say of him will find no escape from 
such a painful life so perfect as in setting himself busily 
to work to help those very people's best good in what way 
he can. The study of their wants will make him care- 
less of their judgments. A healthy interest in them 
will crowd out the morbid interest which is always ser- 
vilely hanging on their opinions and afraid of their sneers. 
Between the man who is afraid to go his own simple 
way, for fear that his brother will laugh at him, and that 
same man nobly resolving with Paul, that if meat cause 
liis brother to offend he will eat no meat while the world 
stands, what a vast difference ! What slavery in the one 
condition ! What true servantship and freedom in the 
other ! And if a true faith in Christ does indeed take 
all men up into His humanity, and, because we are His 
servants, make us the servants also, the willing servants, 
of all men, as His brethren, and for His sake ; if when 
I am really Christ's, the man by my side whom I have 



THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 95 

feared and flattered becomes changed into a brother 
of my Lord for whom I am to work as if I worked 
for Him, then does not Christianity save a man from 
the low servitude by introducing him into the higher 
service? Entering into Christ, I find there my breth- 
ren as His brethren ; and while I devote myself to 
them as earnestly as I can, I cease to care for their idle 
criticisms and foolish quarrels. Once more He has hid 
me in His pavilion from the strife of tongues. And yet 
you see how very far this picture of Christian security is 
from easy self-indulgence and idle rest. It is all alive 
with work, only it is a work that is full of peace. 

These are the elements, then, of the Christian's secur- 
ity. These are what Christ's religion does for us all to 
lift us up above and separate us from the pride of men and 
the strife of tongues. It does not take us away out of the 
world, but right here in the world it surrounds us with 
God's presence, it brings out our own personality, and it 
teaches us the value of the things we used to fear, so that 
we can despise them. Again I turn — as I have turned so 
often in describing any aspect or power of the Christian 
life — to see a perfect manifestation in the perfect Chris- 
tian life of Christ. As we look over His career, how can 
we describe its serenity and composure except in these 
words : " God hid Him in the secret of His presence from 
the pride of man, and kept Him secretly in a pavilion 
from the strife of tongues." How the strife of tongues 
raged about Him all his life ! From the time when Herod 
and the scribes debated where He was to.be born, that 
they might murder Him, down to the day when the peo- 
ple cried, "Crucify Him," and mocked Him as He hung 
upon the cross ; in the days when the crowded synagogue 



96 THE SOUL'S EEFUGE IN GOD. 

at Nazareth rose up and clamored for His blood ; in the 
day when the Pharisees gathered around Him in the tem- 
ple and poured their subtle questions fast upon Him to 
try to drive Him to a foolish word ; in the day when the 
disciples came to a quarrel in His very sight about their 
poor ambition to be greatest : in these, and countless days 
like them, He lived right in the midst of the strife of 
tongues. But, close to His Father always, clear in His 
own duty always, and always trying to help men so ear- 
nestly that He was not capable of being provoked by them, 
He was completely apart from all the strife, He was hid 
in the secret of His Father's presence. We cannot but be 
struck with awe when we think what that phrase, whoso 
beauty and significance we have partly understood as it 
applied to us, must have meant to Jesus. Our closest 
communion with God is so distant compared with the 
perfect oneness between Him and His Father. We run 
into the shelter of the divine life, just creep across the 
threshold where no trouble can pursue, and stand thank- 
ful and trembling there. We hide ourself behind the 
robes of the Eternal Mercy, and thence look out in an 
assurance, that is fearful still, upon the danger which 
cannot touch us there. But He, from the very heart of 
the Eternal Being, looks out on sin and sees its weak- 
ness, looks out on goodness and sees its strength. We 
cannot know His peace. It must have been so absolute. 
There must have been such a pity in His heart when 
they tormented Him, when they tied Him to a column 
and scourged .Him, when they nailed Him to the cross 
at last, and all the while were looking to see Him give 
way and tremble, and all the while the soul which they 
thought they were reaching and torturing was far off, 



THE SOUL'S REFUGE IN GOD. 97 

beyond their reach, hid in the secret of God's presence, 
hid in God. It was as if men flung water at the stars 
and tried to put them out, and the stars shone on calmly 
and safely and took no notice of their persecutors, except 
to give them light. 

And this brings up to us that verse of Paul's, which is 
the very verse we need to close with. He talks of the 
life that men might live, that some men do live, and he 
says, " Your life is hid with Christ in God." If we are 
really Christ's, then back into the very bosom of His Fa- 
ther where Christ is hid, there He will carry us. We too 
shall look out and be as calm and as independent as He is. 
The needs of men shall touch us just as keenly as they 
touch Him, but the sneers and strifes of men shall pass 
us by as they pass by Him and leave no mark on His un- 
ruffled life. It will be just as impossible, when that time 
comes, for us to work ourself into a passion about yester- 
day's gossip, as it was for Jesus to become a partisan in 
the quarrel about the undivided inheritance. And yet 
for us, just as for Him, this will not mean a cold and self- 
ish separation from our brethren. We shall be infinitely 
closer to their real life when we separate ourself from 
their outside strifes and superficial pride, and know and 
love them truly by knowing and loving them in God. 

This is the power and progress of true Christianity. 
It leads us into, it abounds in peace. It is a brave, vig- 
orous peace, full of life, full of interest and work. It is 
a peace that means thoroughness, that refuses to waste 
its force and time in little superficial tumults which come 
to nothing, while there is so much real work to be done, 
so much real help to be given, and such a real life to be 
lived with God. That peace, His peace, may Jesus give 

to us all. 

7 



VI. 

THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 

"Are the consolations of God small with thee 1" — Job v. 11. 

If we could fully tell each other our thoughts of God, 
or if we could look with perfect clearness into one an- 
other's hearts, and see what thought of the great Father 
is lying there, no doubt the variety of our conceptions 
of Him would surprise us very much. He must appear 
so differently to His different children ; and while this 
difference of our ideas of God indicates, no doubt, in part 
our blindness and half-sighted ness, it indicates still more 
the many-sidedness of His great nature. He has a dif- 
ferent side of Himself to show to each of us. 

But this is not all. Not only to different men does 
God give different impressions of Himself, but on differ- 
ent parts of the same man's life He shines with very 
different lights and colors. Can we remember when we 
were children, and had our own thoughts of God, how 
very strange, how hard to grasp appeared the pictures of 
Him which seemed to give our elders such delight ; the 
accounts which we read in grown-up people's books, or 
heard in the sermons of grown-up ministers? The truly 
live and growing Christian might mark the different 
stages of his advancing life by the different aspects which 
he saw of God. He might recognize his fifteenth year by 
one sort of revelation of the Fatherhood, and his twenty- 



THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 99 

fifth by another, and his fiftieth by another. It would be 
a noble biography, — the history of the sun's rising, and 
of the different stories that it told of itself, the different 
shadows that it cast, until its perfect noon. It may be 
that in eternity there shall be some such ageless condition 
as shall comprise the vision of all ages, and take in at 
once the whole character of God ; but here the beauty of 
living lies largely in the way in which we are always com- 
ing in sight of new characteristics and capacities in Him. 
I want to speak to-day about God as the Consoler. 
" Are the consolations of God small with thee ?" And I 
have been led to these opening words by thinking how 
this side of God's life shows itself only to certain con- 
ditions of this life of ours. It is not for everybody. It 
is not for the very young and joyous. You would not 
go to a young man just bursting through the open doors 
of life, radiant with health, eager for work, with an in- 
finite sense of vitality, and say, " Come, here is God, who 
consoles men. Give yourself to Him." To such a soul 
you have something else to say : " Here is God the 
strengthener. Here is the Setter of great tasks ; the 
God who holds His crown of victory on the tops of high 
mountains up which His eager-hearted young heroes may 
climb to win it ; the God who asks great sacrifices and 
who gives glorious rewards." That is what you would 
say, or what you ought to say, to the young strong man to 
whom you want to make God known. You say nothing 
about the God of repair, the God of consolation, the God 
who takes the broken life into His hands and mends it ; 
nothing of that God yet. The time will come for that. 
And is there anything more touching and pathetic in the 
history of man than to see how absolutely, without excep- 



100 THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 

tion, the men and women who start out with only the 
need of tasks, of duties, of something which can call out 
their powers, and of the smile of God stimulating and 
encouraging them, — how they all come, one by one, cer- 
tainly up to the place in life where they need consola- 
tion ? i will tell you what it seems to me like. Have 
you ever seen, or perhaps made one of, a party of people 
who were going to explore some deep, dark cavern, — the 
Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, or the Catacombs of R^me ? 
They all stand out in the sunlight, and the attendants, 
who know the journey they are going to make, pass 
round among them and put into the hands of each a 
lighted candle. How useless it seems. How pale and 
colorless the little flame appears in the gorgeous flood of 
sunlight. But the procession moves along. One after 
another enters the dark cavern's mouth. One after 
another loses the splendor of daylight. In the hands 
of one after another the feeble candle-flame comes out 
bright in the darkness, and by and by they are all walk- 
ing in the dark, holding fast their candles as if the}'- 
wei-e their very life ; totally dependent now upon what 
seemed so useless half an hour ago. That seems to 
me to be a picture of the way in which God's prom- 
ises of consolation, which we attach but very little mean- 
ing to at first, come out into beauty and value as we 
pass on into our lives. The nature begins to break 
somewhere. Perhaps the physical strength gives way 
first. Long before the courage of the heart or the 
mind's quick activity is dimmed, the knees refuse their 
office and the heart beats slow. It is an epoch in a 
man's life when he takes his first medicine to repair 
the ravages of time, the wear of the machine. Be- 



THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 101 

fore he has taken food for support ; now he takes med- 
icine for repair. He has reached his need of consolation. 
Or perhaps it is the spirit that gives way before the body 
breaks. No matter in what order the new need arrives, 
there is something pathetic in the way in which it comes 
to everybody. The social life decays, or with one dread- 
ful blow is dashed to pieces. The perfect trust we had 
in one another is dislodged. The courage goes out on its 
task and brings back no booty of success. The terrible 
disappointment in self, the consciousness of sin, bursts or 
creeps in upon us, and then the hands for the first time 
are reached out for consolation, and the great doors — 
which we have hardly noticed as we passed and repassed 
on this side of the Divine nature, they were shut so close, 
and we saw so little need of entering this way — are flung 
wide open to take the tired and disappointed creature in. 
It is as if we had sailed gayly all day up and down a 
glorious coast, rejoicing in the winds that swept around 
its headlands and caught our sails, thinking the bolder 
the coast the better, never asking whether there were a 
place of refuge anywhere ; till at last the storm burst 
upon us, and then we never thought the coast so beauti- 
ful as when we saw her open an unexpected harbor, and 
take us into still water behind the rocks that we had 
been glorying in, out of the tempest's reach. 

The world seems to have lived the same life, with the 
same succession of experiences in which each man lives. 
What is the old story of the book of Genesis but this, 
— the tale of how the world came to need, and, when it 
needed, found God the consoler ? There was no talk of 
consolation in those walks beneath the trees, before the 
sin, when man and his Maker held mysterious converse 



102 THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 

ill ways which we with our blinded senses cannot know. 
How many ages slipped by so, who can tell ? But by 
and by the catastrophe whose fruits are in all men's 
lives came, and how instantly a new power in God was 
touched. In all the anger of God in these first chapters 
of the Book of Life after the fall, we feel still that we 
have touched a before unmanifested power of His nat- 
ure. With the first promise of repair, the first suggestion 
of a Redeemer, He has opened His power of consolation. 
It is as if we saw a father stoop, and for the first time 
pick up and set upon his feet the child who thus far had 
run strongly on and needed only to be guided. It gives 
us a new sight into the heart of his fatherhood ; and so 
since Eden the world has rested, not merely on the helps 
and the commandments, but on the consolations of God. 

When we think about the death of children, and of the 
other life on which they enter after they have left this 
world, it seems as if it must be an everlasting difference 
in that life for them, that they have never known what it 
is to be consoled by God. That they will be less happy 
no man can say ; for who shall compare with one another 
the perfect happinesses of Heaven ? But surely there 
must be something of God that has been shown to His 
venerable servant, who has been consoled a thousand 
times, whose life has been broken again and again, and 
again and again repaired by God ; something that he 
knows of God which never can be known to the little 
child whose life, from its first beginning here to the very 
end of its eternity, never sinned or sorrowed, and so 
never needed repair or consolation. 

And yet we cannot say how early in this life of ours 
the God of consolation may be needed, and may show 



THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 103 

Himself to the needy soul. I would not seem to count out 
of my subject for to-day those of my people, the youngest, 
the happiest, the most hopeful, on whom I should be 
sorry any Sunday to turn my back and say, " There is 
nothing for you to-day." Perhaps their hearts will tell 
me that they have sorrows and disappointments of their 
own. And certainly they have, and it is the glory 
of God's consolations that they reach every grade and 
kind of need. The child with his sorrows has as much 
right to them as the man with his. Indeed, there is one 
view in which no trouble of man is great enough, and 
then there is another view in which no trouble of man is 
too small, to be worthy of touching the heart of God. 
And so let us count nobody out ; let us all come together 
and try to find what God's consolations are ; try to find 
how God consoles His people. 

1. What I shall say will be good for nothing, will be 
mere theorizing, unless I simply draw out our own ex- 
perience of God into description, and tell how He really 
has consoled us all. Let me say, then, first of all, that 
God is the consoler of man by the very fact of His exist- 
ence. There is a class of passages in the Bible which to 
me seem mysteriously beautiful, and which appear to rest 
the peace of the human soul upon the mere fact of the ex- 
istence of the larger life of God. Such is that verse of 
the forty-sixth Psalm, " Be still, and know that I am God." 
" Thou slialt know that I, the Lord, am," is the noble 
promise that comes again and again, full of reassurance. 
And when God's people, trampled, bruised, broken, trod- 
den in the dust in Egypt, asked by Moses for the name 
of the God who had promised them His deliverance, it 
was a mere assertion of the awful and supreme existence 



104 THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 

that was given in reply : " I AM bath sent me." No 
doubt in all such cases there is active character within 
the mere existence and coming out clearly through it, 
and this character has its declared relations to the man 
who needs consoling, but still it is primarily the fact of 
existence. It is because God is that man is bidden to be 
at peace. And this is not hard to understand. If any- 
body has ever felt that his life, with its little woes, was 
easier to bear because there were great men living the 
same human life with him, he can understand it perfectly. 
The men of larger life of whom he knew never came 
near him, never touched his life, never spoke to him, per- 
haps never knew of his existence. It may be they were 
merely men whose lives he had read in books. For here 
is one of the greatest uses of really great history and bi- 
ography, in their peace-giving and consoling power. It 
was not what the great men of the world had done. It 
was simply that they had existed. I pity the man who 
has never in his best moods felt his life consoled and com- 
forted in its littleness by the larger lives that he could 
look at and know that they too were men, living in the 
same humanity with himself, only living in it so much 
more largely. 

For so much of our need of consolation comes just in 
this way, from the littleness of our life, its pettiness and 
weariness insensibly transferring itself to all life, and mak- 
ing us skeptical about anything great or worth living for 
in life at all ; and it is our rescue from this debilitating 
doubt that is the blessing which falls upon us when, leav- 
ing our own insignificance behind, we let our hearts rest 
with comfort on the mere fact that there are men of 
great, broad, generous, and healthy lives, — men like the 
greatest that we know. 



THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 105 

Indeed the power of mere activity is often overrated. 
It is not what the best men do, but wliat tliey are, that 
constitutes their truest benefaction to their fellow-men. 
The things that men do get their chief value, after all, 
from the way in which they are able to show the exist- 
ence of character which can comfort and help mankind. 
Certainly, in our own little sphere, it is not the most 
active people to whom we owe the most. Among the 
common people whom we know it is not necessarily those 
who are busiest, not those who, meteor-like, are ever on 
the rush after some visible change and work. It is the 
lives, like the stars, which simply pour down on us the 
calm light of their bright and faithful being, up to which 
we look and out of which we gather the deepest calm 
and courage. It seems to me that there is reassurance 
here for many of us who seem to have no chance for act- 
ive usefulness. We can do nothing for our fellow-men. 
But still it is good to know that we can be something for 
them ; to know (and this we may know surely) that no 
man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, 
gentle, pure, and good, without the world being better 
for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by 
the very existence of that goodness. 

And now just so it is with God's life and the hfe of 
man. Here is an atheist. He is a thoughtful, conscien- 
tious man, but by failure after failure his life has been 
broken down into a low and hopeless tone. He has come 
to a terrible doubt whether there is any such thing as be- 
ing good. He seems a mere sham to himself, and all his 
fellow-men are shams around him. Give what account 
he will of what men call righteousness, he has really lost 
the belief of absolute morality altogether. He is demor- 



106 THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 

alized. He has fallen down into the wretched theories 
of expediency, and he hates himself for lying there, and 
yet he cannot get away. Does not that man need con- 
solation ? Poor fellow, with his broken wings and be- 
wildered brain, where is the man that has any such need 
as he has to be taken up into some strong, wise arms, and 
to be refreshed, repaired, remoralized ? And then sud- 
denly or gradually it is made known to this man that 
there is a perfect God. Is that nothing to him ? The 
God does not speak to him yet. He does not know that 
the God cares for him ; not even that the God is aware 
of him. Only this, that the God is ; that purity is not 
a delusion, and justice not a guess, for there is a perfectly 
pure, just Being ; there is a righteous one. Is it not 
like the sunrising to that poor broken man ? Is he not 
comforted ? I do not believe that there is any darkest, 
deepest dungeon under any horrible old castle, most ut- 
terly and hopelessly out of the reach of sunlight, in which 
it would not bring a new pang to the heart of the poor 
wretch imprisoned there if he knew that the sun, which 
he never sa;w and never should see again, was gone out 
of the heavens. Although he lives utterly in the dark, 
the knowledge that there is sunlight helps him and 
he is not quite desperate. Although we live petty and 
foolish lives, the knowledge that there is greatness and 
wisdom, the knowledge that there is God, is a far greater 
and more constant consolation to us than we know. 

2. But we must go a great deal farther than this. We 
begin with the knowledge of God's existence, and that 
consoles us when we are in perplexity and sorrow. 
Many and many a heart has entered into that knowl- 
edge, and found it the entrance into peace. But what 



THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 107 

comes next? The sympathy of this same God, whose 
existence is ah-eady real to us. It becomes known to us 
not merely that He is, but that He cares for us. Not 
merely His life, but His love, becomes a fact. Surely this 
is a great step forward. We had to convince ourselves 
perhaps that there was not something cold and distant in 
the thought of the divine existence as a source of human 
consolation. We know that that thought does wonder- 
fully help those to whom it is very real, but it is not so 
easy to understand beforehand that it will help men to 
know of the great " I AM." But here there can be no 
doubt. Any one will say, " If I could only be sure that 
He, the God of all things, really cares for me ; that when 
any sorrow comes to me, it strikes right at His heart, and 
He is sorry too, — if I could be sure of this, I do not 
know of anything I could not bear. What is there that 
I could not tolerate ? Nay, what is there that I would 
not almost welcome, if it could by any violence break 
open a way b}'- which God could come down to me and 
show me that perfect natui'e as my friend, my helper, 
thoughtful for ray welfare and my woe?" Nor is this all 
mere selfishness. I rather like to think that the real rea- 
son why the sufferer rejoices in the sympathy of God is 
that thereby, through love, that dear and perfect nature 
after which he has struggled before is made completely 
known to him. Love is the translating medium. It is 
not merely that now that whose absolute existence he had 
comprehended already has become his ; that he is reap- 
ing the benefit of that which before he had regarded only 
as absolutely being. It is not only that the sky, which 
hung in majesty and peace over the whole earth, at last 
has dropped its rain upon his garden. It is rather that 



108 THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 

through this special love for him, the absolute and ever- 
lasting Deity has been made known to him. It is that 
through God's sympathy he knows God more intensely 
and more nearly, and so all the consolations of God's 

being have become more real to him. 

. . . . • 

I think that this is so. I think that any sensitive and 

thoughtful soul will feel the real distinction. And yet I 
do not think much of such distinctions. I know we do 
not gain, but rather lose, by any attempt to separate the 
elements of comfort that come to man's soul in the one 
complete round gift of the sympathy of God. Who shall 
attempt to describe the indescribable, and tell the power 
of sympathy ? You go to see your friend on whom some 
great sorrow has fallen. You sit beside him. You look 
into his eyes. You say a few broken and faltering words. 
And then you go away disheartened. How entirely you 
have failed to do for him that which you went to do, 
that which you would have given the world to do. How 
you have seemed only to intrude on him with vulgar curi- 
osity when you really longed to help him. How many 
times you have done this, and then how many times you 
have been afterwards surprised to find that you really did 
help him with that silent visit. My dear friends, never 
let the seeming worthlessness of sympathy make you keep 
back that sympathy of which, when men are suffering 
around you, your heart is full. Go and give it without 
asking yourself whether it is worth the while to give it. 
It is too sacred a thing for you to tell what it is worth. 
God, from whom it comes, sends it through you to His 
needy child. Do not ever let any low skepticism make 
you distrust it, but speak out what God has put it in 
your heart to speak to any sufferer. The sympathy of 



THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 109 

God for man has just this same difficulty about it, if 
we try to analyze it. We cannot say that He has done 
anything for us. We cannot tell even of any thought 
that He has put into our minds. Merely He has been 
near us. He has known that we were in trouble and He 
has been sorry for us. 

How do we learn of such a sympathy of God ? How 
can we really come to believe that He knows our individ- 
ual troubles, and sorrows for them with us ? I think 
that this is a hard question for a great many people. 
The magnitude of the world, the multitudes of souls that 
God has made, perplexes many hearts, and makes it very 
hard for them to believe in personal, individual sympathy 
and care. More than from any abstract or scientific ar- 
guments about the universality of great laws, I think it 
is the bigness of the world, the millions upon millions of 
needy souls, that makes it hard for men to believe in the 
discriminating care and personal love of God for each. 
Our wider view across the world, the readiness with which 
we take in all the millions of our fellow-men, makes it 
harder for us. The Jew, shut up in his little nation, found 
it easier. In such perplexity what shall we do ? I know 
only the most simple answers. In the first place, give 
free and bold play to those instincts of the heart which 
believe that the Creator must care for the creatures He 
has made, and that the only real effective care for them 
must be that which takes each of them into His love, 
and knowing it separately surrounds it with His separate 
sympathy. In the next place, open the heart to that same 
conviction as it has been profoundly pressed upon the 
hearts of multitudes of men everywhere. It is not in- 
conceivable. It is only the special prominence of certain 



110 THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 

ideas in our time which have made some people think 
it inconceivable that a personal God should care sep- 
arately for every one of His million children. It is not 
inconceivable when such multitudes of men have con- 
ceived it, have rested their whole weight upon that 
assurance, have run into the shelter of that certainty 
whenever the storm was too high and too strong for 
them. Above all, get the great spirit of the Bible. 
Read into the heart of the Book of Life until you are 
thoroughly possessed with its idea, — the idea which gives 
it its whole consistency and shape, the idea without 
which it would all drop to pieces, — that there is not one 
life which the Life Giver ever loses out of His sight ; 
not one which sins so that He casts it away ; not one 
which is not so near to Him that whatever touches it 
touches Him with sorrow or with joy. I know nothing 
which can secure a man from the sad skepticism about 
the personal sympathy of God, like a complete entrance 
into the atmosphere and spirit of the Bible, in which that 
sympathy is the first accepted fact of life. 

3. By His existence and by His felt sympathy, then, 
God gives His consolations to the souls of those who 
need them. But more than this. When your friend is 
in trouble you first of all try to remind him, in some most 
unobtrusive way, that you are living and that you are his 
friend. Any little token of your life, a gift of flowers, 
or any trifle, will do that. Then you go and sit down 
by him, and without a word let him know not merely in 
general that you are his friend, but that you ai-e very 
sorry for liim in this special sorrow. But if you really 
respect him and care for his whole nature, you want to do 
something more than that. You want, in the kindest 



THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. Ill 

and gentlest way, to get certain great consoling thoughts 
home to his bruised and broken heart. You are not sat- 
isfied until the reason, too, has found its consolation, and 
through its open doors comfort has sjwead through the 
part of his nature which is open to that access. And so 
it is with God. He, too, has His great truths, His ideas 
which He brings to the hearts He wishes to console. He 
does not treat His sufferers like children who are simply 
to be petted with soft words, and patted with soft hands 
till they forget their grief. He deals with them as men 
who are capable of knowing the meanings, the explana- 
tions, and the purposes of the troubles that come to them. 
And so He gives them His great truths of consolation. 
What are those truths ? Education, spirituality, and im- 
mortality, — these seem to be the sum of them. You are 
in great distress. Your friend is gone. Your life is broken. 
Your soul is stunned. Is it possible that, sitting still or 
walking drearily about in your grief, God should make 
you know education or the law of growth, the endless 
principle of the sacrifice of a present for a better future ; 
should reveal spirituality, and make you know the soul's 
value as far superior to anything that can concern the 
outer life ; should open to you immortality, and show you 
the endlessness of His plans, so that what has seemed to 
your wretchedness to be complete and finished, should ap- 
pear to be only just begun, and not ready to be judged of 
yet ? Is there no consolation in these great thoughts ? 
They do not take your sorrow off ; and oh, my dear 
friend, whatever be your suffering, I beg you to learn first 
of all that not that, not to take your sorrow off, is what 
God means, but to put strength into you that you may 
carry it as the tired man, who has drunk the strength-giv- 



112 THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 

ing river, lifts up his burden by the river-bank and goes 
singing on his way. Be sure your sorrow is not giving you 
its best unless it makes you a more thoughtful man than 
you have ever been before, unless it opens to you ideas 
that have before been unfamiliar ; mostly these three 
ideas, education, spirituality, immortality. Those ideas 
are the keys of all the mysteries of life, and so the gate- 
ways to consolation. And it is wonderful to see how, 
just as soon as a man is really crushed and sorrowful, 
God seems by every avenue to be offering those great 
ideas for that man's acceptance. He seems to write them 
on the sky, to whisper them from every movement of 
the commonest machinery of hfe, to fill books witli them 
that never seemTed to know anytliing of them before, to 
make the vacant house and the full grave declai'e them. 
You are a child of God whom He is training. You have 
a soul which is your true value. You are to live forever. 
Know these truths. By them triumph over the sorrow 
that He cannot take away, and be consoled. 

4. But even this is not all. God consoles us by what 
He is, by what He feels for us, by what He teaches us. 
But all these, as I tell them over, seem to have some- 
thing passive about them. They show God sitting as it 
were, and letting His life flow out in blessing upon the 
emptied life that needs Him. But there is hardly a suf- 
ferer who does not crave something more active, if we 
may say so. He wants to feel, at any rate he thinks 
how blessed it would be if he could feel, God doing some- 
thing on his life, showing his sympathy by some strong 
act. " Bow thy heavens, O Lord, and come down," he 
cries; " touch the mountains and they shall smoke." And 
so he prays for God to help him, to do something positive 



THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 113 

for him. What shall it be ? Men are puzzled a good deal 
about prayer nowadays. I suppose a good many men 
have really stopped praying for some things which they 
used to pray for, and for some things which God vei*y 
much wishes them to pray for still. But the prayer of 
men for what their souls will always count the greatest 
miracle of God, for spiritual regeneration, for newei', 
deeper, holier lives, that prayer has probably not been 
much affected by all the speculations about prayer. It 
is prayed just as often and as earnestly as ever, and so 
it will continue to be as long as men's souls continue to 
bear witness to the power and reality with which it is 
answered. " Create me a clean heart, O God, and renew 
a right spirit within me." Men will keep on praying 
that so long as they believe there is a God, even if they 
have long ceased to pray for the changing of the wind 
and the stopping of the pestilence. And so when a man 
in trouble prays God to do something for him, this is the 
real miracle by which God stands ready to answer that 
man's prayer. He will not send an angel as He did to 
the women at the tomb, but He will come Himself and 
show His presence and His power by working the miracle 
of regeneration upon the soul that has cried out for Him. 
My dear friends, that is the consummate consolation ; 
everything leads up to that. I see a poor creature sitting 
in sorrow. He catches sight of God's existence and he 
is helped. God sends him assurance of His sympathy, 
and a smile finds its way across the face that seemed all 
given up to sorrow, and looked as if it would never smile 
again. God teaches him His truth, and the disheartened 
heart remembers once more what it was to be brave and 
8 



114 THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 

strong. But then God comes and takes that soul, and 
positively, strongly lifts it up and away into the new life. 
He forgives the man for his sin, and He gives him the 
new heart. He lays the same strong hand on him that 
Christ laid upon the leper. He speaks the same sweet 
word to him that Christ spoke to the adulteress. He for- 
gives him and converts him. He makes him a new man ; 
and then, when the man stands up new, no longer 
crushed by his sorrow, and yet certainl}^ thank God, 
certainly, not having passed out of his sorrow ! — but 
made a new man by the touch of God through his sor- 
row, to him, standing there with his new life before him, 
a new peace in his face, a new courage in his arm, a new 
love in his heart, — come to himself as the new man 
comes by the sacrifice of himself, — come to himself by 
having come to God, — when we look into his glowing 
face, and ask the old question that Eliphaz asked of 
Job, "Are the consolations of God small with thee?" 
How quick and sure his answer comes back : " No, very 
great!" Nay, he is able to take these great words of 
David which it is so terrible to hear people use when they 
do not mean them, and he fills them with meaning, as he 
says with serious joy, "It is good for me that I have been 
afflicted." 

Are the consolations of God small with thee ? His ex- 
istence. His sympathy. His truth, His power. As I re- 
count them all, it seems to me so great and beautiful to 
be the child of such a God. And pain and suffering 
grow holy when we think how through them the Father 
comes to His children. Let us not be cheated by mere 
theories to say that sorrow is not dreadful. Let us not 



THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 115 

Btand here in perfect health with our unbroken fiiend- 
ships and dai-e to say that sickness is not wearisome, and 
bereavement is not sad. We onl}^ mock the sufferers all 
round us when we say that. It is very cruel. But let 
us claim that if a man really is close to God there is a 
victory over the pain and a transfiguration of the sad- 
ness. " If a man is close to God." Can we say that 
and not remember how the Godhood and the manhood 
met in the Incarnation ? Can we say that and not re- 
member that all we have been saying was supremely 
realized when the Son of God was born and lived and 
died for us ? God's being ! Who could doubt it, as He 
walked the streets, and men saw God in His face ? He 
brought it with Him across the threshold of the temple, 
and through the low doorway of the cottage of Bethany. 
God's pity ! Who did not see it as He laid His hands 
upon the children's heads and looked down, from the 
Mount of Olives, on Jerusalem ? God's truth ! Who 
must not hear it speaking as He talks with Nicodemus, 
or preaches from the mountain ? God's power ! What 
more has it any need of proof, when the finger laid upon 
the hem of His garment gives the lost health back again, 
when the "death upon the cross is the salvation of the 
world? All that there is consolatory in God, — being, 
sympathy, truth, power, — Christ has set in the clearness 
and the splendor of His life. 

And so if you want consolation you must come to Him. 
It is not a dead phrase. It was not dead when He spoke 
it first in Jerusalem, and said " Come to me." It was the 
very word of life. You must come to Him, know Him, 
love Him, serve Him. In His church and His service you 



116 THE CONSOLATIONS OF GOD. 

must take your place. Nay, let us not say " must." Our 
duties are always best stated as our privileges. You may 
come to Him, for He has said, "Come unto me all ye that 
are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." 
May we all come nearer and nearer to Him always, and 
find peace. 



VII. 
ALL SAINTS' DAY. 

" After this I beheld, aud lo, a great multitude, which no man could 
number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before 
the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in 
their hands ; and cried with a loud voice, saying, Salvation to our God 
which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb." — Rev. vii. 9, 10. 

In the calendar of the Church to-day is set apart to be 
celebrated as All Saints' Day. Besides the special com- 
memorations of particular saints, as St. Peter and St. 
John, one day is given to the commemoration of the 
great general idea of Sainthood. It seems to gather in 
all the multitude of the holy, in every age, and bids us 
think of their characters and follow* in their steps. Its 
Collect prays that "we may so follow God's blessed Saints 
in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to 
those unspeakable joys which He has prepared for those 
who unfeignedly love Him." This idea of one life follow- 
ing after and strengthening itself by another life which 
has gone before it seems to be the great idea of All 
Saints' Day, and to this I invite your study to-night. It 
opens wide subjects of religion and of life. 

What is there in the world for each of us that would 
not be here if others had not lived before us, if we were 
the first generation that ever peopled this populous earth 
of ours ? What are the legacies that the past sends down 
to us? Let us see. First, there are certain circumstances, 



118 ALL saints' day. 

such as govern raent and society, social improvements, cit- 
ies, and railroads, and houses, all art, all the furniture 
and tools of life. All these things men have gradually, 
in the course of ages, invented and worked out, and they 
are permanent, and have come down to us in their accu- 
mulation. All that makes earth something else than a 
primeval wilderness when we step into it, — all this is 
the great bequest of circumstances. Then, besides these, 
there are certain truths ; all the knowledge that man has 
ever won, of physics, of metaphysics, of morals, of relig- 
ion, of beauty, — all this we have not to win over again 
for ourselves. The truths come down to us all found, 
and we have only to take them and use them. Certain 
circumstances then and certain truths. These are great 
legacies surely. But, beside these, there is another gift 
— of certain inspirations which we find waiting for us in 
the world. Men have left behind them not only the sys- 
tems and structures that they built, and the truths that 
they discovered, but their examples, their enthusiasms, 
and their standards. The impulse and contagion of their 
work is waiting everywhere to breathe itself into ours. 
A thousand incentives to use the circumstances and to 
learn the truths, a thousand impulses to action press on 
the new-born hfe out of the past. The men who are 
gone seem to have left behind them in the world much 
of their power of vitality ; and I suppose hardly a day 
passes in which we do not do some act, small or great, 
under this kind of inspiration from our predecessors, 
something that we should not have done, or should have 
done differently, if, even with all the machinery of liv- 
ing and all the truths that we know now, we had had no 
predecessors, had been the first tenants of our earth. 



ALL saints' day. 119 

The power of this inspiration comes in various ways. 
In some degree it is the mere force of hereditation. Some 
tastes and tendencies we get in our very blood, just as 
we get the shape of our features or the color of our eyes. 
This of course confines the influence to a very narrow 
range. Then there is the distinct power of example. 
We see that other men have done certain things, and 
that they turned out well, and we say we will do the 
same. Our forefathers have set the step for the great 
journey of life ; they have found out where the quag- 
mires and where the solid ground is likeliest to lie, and 
we cannot do better than follow in their steps. But be- 
sides and above all these, they have set up certain ideals 
of character, not reducible to precise rules of action, with 
which we enter into sympathy, and to whose likeness our 
lives almost unconsciously attempt to shape themselves. 

This power of influence may belong to all the past in 
general. Out of all. the living that men have done what 
young man has not seen gather one complete and total 
image of what the human life should be ? From all the 
multitude of failures and successes rises up the picture of 
a true, successful manhood, — the perfect man. That is 
our leader. Not in any special man, but generally, this 
ideal of manhood tempts and inspires and entices us to 
action. 

Or yet again we see that power incorporate itself in 
some great man. Dead or alive, past or contemporary, 
some mighty character stands out and says, " Come, fol- 
low me ; " and who can explain the subtle fascination that 
reaches everywhere, and lays hold of all kinds of men, 
and turns their lives out of their course to follow his 
course ; to be with him in some sympathy of purpose, 



120 ALi saints' day. 

and, if possible, to be like him in some similarity of nat- 
ure ? " As I take it," says Cavlyle, " Universal History, 
the history of what man has accomplished in this world, 
is at bottom the history of the great men who have 
worked here." So all absorbing seems in his philosophy 
the leadership of the leaders. 

We may go farther than this, and analyze the power 
of leadership that great men have. It is of three kinds. 
It may rest in either of three things : 1st. It may be in 
mere strength of personality. Mere strong individual- 
ity, showing itself in any act of prowess, attracts men 
and influences them. In this case the leader is what we 
call a hero, — a Charlemagne or Napoleon or Cassar. Or, 
2d. It may be in some truths that he teaches. The leader 
may lead men by the power of ideas, of superior knowl- 
edge. Then the leader is a teacher. Such leaders were 
Plato and Shakespeare and Bacon. Or, 3d, and above 
all, it may be in a certain thing which we call holiness, 
which we cannot define otherwise than that it is a larger 
and more manifest presence of God in the life of one man 
than other men have, — more sympathetic nearness to 
Divinity, which makes men feel that he, more than they, 
embodies the Divine Spirit and utters the Divine will ; 
that he shows God to them. This is the leadership of 
the saint. These are the three : the hero, the teacher, 
and the saint. These are the leaders, the inspirers of 
men. To each of these we attach ourselves, and draw 
out strength from them ; strength for action from the 
hero, strength for thought from the teacher, strength for 
piety and goodness from the saint. 

We have reached then this distinctive definition of the 
saint. He is the man whose power comes of his holi- 



ALL saints' day. 121 

ness, — of his godlikeness. It is a special kind of power ; 
and it is the strongest kind of power where it can be 
brouglit to bear at all. It must be so because religion is 
the pi'ofoundest interest of our nature, and religious as- 
sociation and religious admiration lay mightier hold of 
us than any other. There is an attitude which man as- 
sumes toward God different from that which he can take 
toward any of his fellow-beings. Now in the hero man 
feels that there is something of God's power, but by no 
means, of necessity, any of God Himself. All power 
comes from God ; but, horribly misused and perverted as 
it often is, no man can fall down in adoration before the 
violent destructiveness of strong personality as it shows 
itself in a Cassar or an Attila. And in the teacher 
there is God's truth, because all truth is God's, but the 
teacher is only the glass through which it shines ; at 
best the glass which condenses and applies its rays ; and 
everybody feels that it is the light and not the glass 
which he must worship. But in the saint, in the embod- 
iment of holiness among men, there is something more 
than the mere power or the mere truth of God. Here 
is something of God Himself, a real abiding presence 
of divinity ; and the attitude which the observer takes 
towards Him has somewhat of the character with which 
he bows himself even before God. The hero demands 
astonished admiration ; the teacher challenges obedient 
reverence ; but the saint wins a sympathetic, loving 
awe. 

It is not easy to make this plain in definitions, but 
when you call up your experience, I am sure that you 
must understand me. A purely good man, a holy man, 
a man whose life and nature you saw always luminous 



122 ALL saints' day. 

with the presence of God in every thought and act and 
word, — have you never been conscious of some power 
in his presence ; or if he were dead, of some power in 
the image of what he was that grew up in you as you 
read or heard about him, utterly unlike that which far 
greater men had over you. He was no hero and no 
teacher. You felt no wonder at his ability, and found 
no intellectual delight in what he told you, but he 
brought God close to you. Why, I know books vivid 
with such a life into which one steps as into the pres- 
ence of God. I have seen rooms where such men or 
such women, weak and ignorant perhaps, were breathing 
out their long days of suffering, which were very Holies 
of Holies. They conducted divinity wonderfully. They 
made God real, and interpreted Him with something of 
the power of the incarnate deity of Christ. 

I am anxious to connect our whole notion of sainthood 
with this idea of power. Saints, as we often think of 
them, are feeble, nerveless creatures, silly and effeminate, 
the mere soft padding of the universe. I would present 
true sainthood to you as the sti'oug chain of God's 
presence in humanity running down through all history, 
and making of it a unity, giving it a large and massive 
strength able to bear great things and to do great things 
too. This unity which the line of sainthood gives to 
history is the great point that shows its strength.- You 
go to your saint and find God working and manifest in 
him. He got near to God by some saint of his that 
went before him, or that stood beside him, in whom he 
saw the Divine presence. That saint again lighted his 
fire at some flame before him ; and so the power of the 
sainthoods animates and fills the world. So holiness and 



ALL saints' day. 123 

purity, and truth and patience, daring and tenderness, 
hope and faith, are kept constant and pervading things 
in our hunianit3\ Each man has not to begin and work 
them out from the beginning for himself. So there is 
a church of God as well as souls of God in the earth. 
This is the truth of All Saints. 

And in this truth we get the great corrective that we 
need of the continual tendency to solitariness and indi- 
viduality in our religion. This church of all the saints 
is a great power in the world. Every true servant of 
God must belong with this mighty service of God ; must 
get his strength through it, and contribute his strength 
into it. Ever from out the past, from the old saints who 
lived in other times, from Enoch, David, Paul, and John, 
Augustine, Jerome, Luther, Leighton, there comes down 
the power of God to us. Because they were full of it, 
we, by association with them, grow fuller of it than we 
could be by ourselves. Our reverence and love for them 
becomes akin to, and bears like fruit in us with our rev- 
ei-ence and love for God. Our faith mounts up with 
their exultant pi-ayers. Our weak devotion, tired and 
drooping, rests against the strong pillars of their certain 
trust. Their quick sight teaches our half- opened eyes 
the way to look toward the light that shall unseal them 
Avholly. How large a part of our godward life is trav- 
elled not by clear landmarks seen far off in the promised 
land, but as travellers climb a mountain peak, by put- 
ting footstep after footstep slowly and patiently into the 
prints which some one going before us, with keener sight, 
with stronger nerves, tied to us by the cord of saintly 
sympathy, has planted deep into the pathless snow of 
the bleak distance that stretches up between humanity 



124 ALL saints' day. 

and God. Take away holy example and the inspiration 
of holy men (and that I wonld call destroying the 
church, not the breaking to pieces of anj external sys- 
tem, for that is the true apostolical saintly succession, the 
tactual succession of heart touching heart with fire) ; take 
that away and you would depopulate heaven. Only one 
bold, supreme soul here and there would still be able to 
scale the height alone, and stand triumphant in the glo- 
rious pi-esence of God. And who can say what distor- 
tion and lack of symmetry there might be in its eternal 
character by the solitariness of its struggles. So we as- 
cend b}'- one another. We live by one another's bless- 
ings, as we die by one another's cursings. No man liveth 
to himself, and no man dieth to himself. We live and 
die not only to God but to each other. 

And yet remember what we said about these saints 
who help us on our way. They were incorporations, not 
of the power, nor of the truth, but of the spirit or the 
character of God. Not heroes nor teachers, but distinctly 
saints. Now in God Himself all three, power and truth 
and character, must go together ; all must be perfect in 
their perfect union in Him. And so they will, to some 
extent, in the saint, who is God's copy ; but not entirely. 
The saint is God's child ; and the child has the father's 
character, but not his truth or his powder. You are in- 
terested and inspired very likely when you see the child 
of a very great man showing his father's qualities, inter- 
preting his father to you, bringing you near to him ; but 
you do not look to see the child of Cresar conquering an- 
other empire, or the child of Shakespeare writing another 
Hamlet. You are surprised if he has not his father's 
character. You are surprised if he has his father's talent 
or his father's knowledge. 



ALL saints' day. 125 

This is important. The Eomanist thinks that his 
saints must have some power of miracle. It is not 
enough for him that they were good godlike men and 
women, manifesting God in daily duty and the patient 
devotion of holy lives. His Blessed Virgin, and St. 
Peter and St. James, St. Joseph, St. Catharine, St. 
Jerome, and the rest, must heal the sick, and raise the 
dead, and tread on serpents, and wield the power of 
divinity over the forces of nature, and help men in their 
business, or they are no saints. Mere holiness is not 
enough. God's power in their acts, as well as God 
Himself in their characters, seems to him necessary. 
And so we are overwhelmed with the torrent of stories 
of miracles of the saints, hung on improbably onto 
their lives, and hiding from us mth their great misty 
halo of uncertainty the really certain holiness and noble- 
ness of the great men and women who adorn the books 
of sainthood. And so he who believes those stories 
easily pauses at such near and convenient repositories 
of power, between himself and God, asks his blessing of 
his familiar saint, not of his unfamiliar deity, and so is 
really not helped nearer to God, but kept farther away 
from God by his saints. This is the practical working. 

And not only among Romanists, but among some 
schools of Protestants, especially, perhaps, in our own 
church, there is another error of essentially the same char- 
acter as this, that is always hampering the freedom of 
Christian life and the progress of Christian truth. We 
have seen that godliness of character ought not neces- 
sarily to be supposed to imply the possession of divine 
miraculous power. But surely it is just as true that it 
does not imply any sort of miraculous divine knowledge, 



126 ALL saints' day. 

or wisdom either. That poor saintly woman by whose 
hovel bedside you go and sit, and rise up edified and 
strengthened, feeling that you have been very near to 
God, it matters nothing to you that she is very ignorant, 
that you wovild not value her opinion on any knotty point 
of history, or doctrine, or economy. What have you to 
do with those things, sitting there by her. The head mo- 
nopolizes life. It has more than its share of treasuries to 
draw on, and fountains to drink from, in the world. It 
is the poor heart, so often half-starved and thirsty, that 
is getting sweet refreshment as you sit and draw it from 
the rich godliness of the suffering saint. Now make this 
wider. Back in the history of the Christian Church runs 
the long pedigree of saintship which I have tried to 
paint before you. Age after age the qualities of God 
have been taken up into the holy lives of men ; and 
honoring this truth of the perpetuated grace and holiness 
of the continual church, we call those great religious men 
who stand out in the several ages high above all the rest, 
the Fathers. There are the fathers of Primitive Chris- 
tianity, the fathers of the Reformation, the fathers of the 
English Church, the fathers of our own American Epis- 
copacy. We hear much in these days about the Fathers 
and their authority. There are some men who would 
coordinate their teaching with that of the New Testa- 
ment, with Christ's and the Apostles'. But if what we 
have said be true, is it not evident that liowever deeply 
we may reverence, however we may be illuminated by 
the sweet or splendid piety of those old men of God, 
there is no true presumption of any infallible wisdom, or 
any inspired knowledge in them, that should make either 
their views of truth, or their laws of church regulation, 



ALL saints' day. 127 

the necessary standards for our thought and action. 
Wise men, wonderful men, many of them most certainly 
were ; and on the other hand many of them always, and 
almost all of them sometimes, wrote and talked puerilities 
and blunders, which are not strange when we consider 
the times in which they lived, but which compel us to 
believe that their reliableness as teachers must be tested 
by the ordinary laws by which we try all our teachers, 
and that they are to be believed only as they convince 
our reason, or conform to that higher authority of revela- 
tion which both they and we allow. From the substance 
of a doctrine down to the size of a diocese, or the color of 
a stole, men quote the Fathers of Nice and Alexandria 
and Rome. Others will tell us that just in this shape 
the truth of justification must be always held because 
Luther or Calvin taught it so. The Prayer-book of the 
English Reformers, and its adaptation by the first bishops 
of our own church, is clothed, by some people, with almost 
superstitious sanctity, as if to alter any jot or tittle in it 
were a sacrilege. This is not well. These men are pat- 
terns for our piety, not tyrants of our thought or action. 
They made mistakes in ritual and government and doc- 
trine. And the old times in which they lived asked of 
them shapes of outward Christian life and church organi- 
zation, which the same live religion that made them create 
them orders us to change. It is their holy temper that 
consecrates them to us. It is their godliness that makes 
them great. In that runs the true chain of sainthood, 
linking the ages together and making the eternal unity 
of the church. Oh, there have been great souls behind us, 
brethren. The stream of truth may widen as the years 
roll on, and sweep us into harbors of thought and knowl- 



128 ALL saints' day. 

edge of which they never dreamed. We may unlearn 
things that they thought were certainties, and take for sure 
truths what they would have turned from as the wildest 
dreams. On the one rock we may build structures of an- 
other shape from theirs. But does that make us greater 
than they were ? Does it authorize us to be contemptuous 
and cast them off as useless ? Has your mere schoolboy a 
right to say that he is greater than Plato, because he lives 
in a house full of luxuries, and can tell you of opinions in 
which Plato was mistaken, and knows facts that Plato 
never dreamed of. Pat them in their true place, and 
the Fathers are mighty. We bow before them as they 
stand through history and win their blessing. Let them 
not be made despots over us, and I will praise them with 
the loudest. A poor extemporized thing the church would 
be without them. If we learn more than they knew, we 
still owe it all to them, for we learn it all in the direc- 
tions which their devout and faithful lives first indicated. 
We learn of God when we look steadil}^ at them, and 
thank Him for the blessing of the saints and fathers. 

I have been anxious to point this out, this absence of 
power of miracle, or of authority in truth in the saints 
of the Christian Church, because we must have some doc- 
trine of the sainthood which shall not for a moment dim 
or distort the leadership and perfect headship of the chris- 
tian, and the church which rests in Christ alone. He 
must do all our great works for us, and teach us all our 
great lessons. Better that the whole calendar were swept 
away and every saint forgotten, than that one of them 
should take anything from that perfect prerogative of 
saviorship which is the Saviour's own. But this need 
not be. Christ, as He leads us on to higher things, may 



ALL saints' day. 129 

still strengthen us with the company of those who have 
the same road to travel, and are walking it in the same 
strength. It surely does not lessen Christ to me as the 
supporter of my sickness, when on my sick-bed I call up 
the image of some sufferer of old, and see him patient in 
the power of a divine sympathy, which then I reach out 
and cry after with all the more certain assurance for my- 
self. Christ is more utterly my sole resource in strong 
temptation, the only Being I can flee to, when I see 
strong men of the saintly histories turned into weakness 
before the power of evil, and fleeing in desperation to 
that same Christ, to be restrengthened with a higher 
power than the old. There is a use of the saints that 
can make Christ nearer, clearer, dearer to our souls. 
They may be like a mere atmosphere between our souls 
and Him, whose every particle, filled with Him, has passed 
on his life to the next particle, and so at last sent him 
down to us pure, as He is, uncolored with its own blue- 
ness, the " light that lighteth every man," lighting us all 
the more brightly because it has lighted them. 

We have been speaking almost altogether of the saints 
of old times. But our subject is " All Saints." The 
question comes then, are there no saints to-day ? Has 
the race run out, or is there such a thing as a modern 
saint ? Yes, surely, I reply. If sainthood means what we 
have said, the indwelling, the manifest indwelling of God 
in man, then there must be many a very saintly saint 
ill tliese late davs of ours. We can well conceive in- 
deed that there may be fewer supreme preeminent saints, 
fewer outreaching pinnacles of grace in the long ranges of 
spiritual life. There does seem to be something arbitrary 
in our modern canonizations, both Protestant and Romish, 
9 



130 ALL saints' day. 

some absence of reason why this or that one should be 
chosen for the aureole or the biography, more than a 
multitude of others who seemed quite as manifestly full 
of God as he. This is conceivable. As all civilization 
and human culture advances, great men become less com- 
mon and less marked. As the general level rises the 
mountain-tops are less prominent. And so as the pres- 
ence of God in humanity becomes more visible every- 
where (and in spite of all men say, I believe there never 
has been a time whose large spiritual level was so high as 
that in which we thank God that we live), as spirituality 
grows more common the sainthoods stand out less marked 
from their surroundings. It is conceivable that a time of 
such general elevation may come, in this world or another, 
that the promontories shall be all lost in the lofty table- 
land of millennial goodness and nobleness. 

Still there are saints enough if we only know how to 
find them. The result of what I have just spoken of will 
be that all saintliness now will have less a miraculous 
and strange appearance, will far more blend in with and 
manifest itself through the channels of the most familiar 
life. The old idea of sainthood demanded miracles of 
those whom it admitted to its calendars. The Church 
of Rome still makes the same demand. All makes the 
sainthood an exceptional, irregular, unusual thing. We 
cannot surely think that this idea has anything like the 
real nobleness of that other which conceives that the 
highest holiness will not work miracles, but only do its 
duty ; will busy itself, not with unusual, but with famil- 
iar things, and make itself manifest, not in prodigies, but 
in the ordinary duties of a common life. 

Indeed to ask for miracles, as exhibitors of charac- 



ALL saints' day. 131 

ter, is always the sign of feeble insight and feeble faith. 
The true father does not ask his son for prodigies of 
submission to approve his filial loyalty. He sees it in 
the hourly look and walk of obedience. The headstrong 
Pharaoh could not see God until He showed Himself in 
the ten plagues. The loving David saw God in the quiet 
guidance of his daily life. " By Thee have I been holden 
up from the womb," he says. I have been struck by 
a fine instance of this discernment of God, not in mira- 
cles, but in the ordinary course of providence, which oc- 
curs in the history of Martin Luther. It was a time when 
things were going very hard with him, a time when all 
the human props of the Reformation seemed ready to fall 
away. It was then that " I saw not long since," cried 
Luther, " a sign in the heavens." Then you begin to 
listen for some startling prodigy. A falling star, a pil- 
lar of fire, a blazing cross held out against the sky. Cer- 
tainly some miracle is coming. But hear what does come. 
" I was looking out of my window at night, and beheld 
the stars, and the whole majestic vault of God, held up 
without my being able to see the pillars on which the 
Master had caused it to rest. Men fear that the sky may 
fall. Poor fools! Is not God always there ? " That is 
all. That is his "sign in the heavens." It is a miracle; 
but only that old miracle that has been shown nightly 
since the heavens and the stars were made, that you and 
I will see when we go out to-night. The eye that sees 
God there is more clear and more blessed than the eye 
that has to be scared into seeing Him by lightnings and 
by firebrands. It is not, if we understand it riglitly, a 
sign of decreasing, but of inci'easing spiritualit}', that 
miracles have ceased. And so it is a truer discrimination 



132 ALL saints' day. 

that recognizes the presences of God in men, the saints 
that are in the world, not b}' the miracles they work but 
by the miracles they are, by the way in which they bring 
the grace of God to bear on the simple duties of the 
household and the street. The sainthoods of the fireside 
and of the market-place — they wear no glory round their 
heads ; they do their duties in the strength of God ; they 
have their martyrdoms and win their palms, and though 
they get into no calendars, they leave a benediction and 
a force behind them on the earth when they go up to 
heaven. 

Every time that we say our Creed, to-night, for in- 
stance, we profess that we " believe in the commun- 
ion of saints." I hope that all which we have said 
has made it a little clearer to us what is the meaning 
of that article of faith. All the souls, everywhere, in 
whom God dwells, dwell together in virtue of that oc- 
cupation. They may be separated very far. They may 
not know each other's tongue. The Divine presence 
in them may take the most utterly various forms of 
expression. Their works in life may be entirely dis- 
tinct. All these are things external. They live to- 
gether as they both abide in God. The symbols of 
that inner life are many ; the multitudinous life itself is 
one. I have preached of the saint as leader. This arti- 
cle of the Creed brings in a higher thought, — the saint 
as brother and companion. It is a higher aspect of 
the same thought, rather, for the two are really one. 
The highest leadership does not stand above its flock to 
rule them. It comes down among them, and is one of 
them. And the completest brotherhood is not mere 
company; it aids and feeds and ministers to its brethren. 



ALL saints' day. 183 

It is leadership also. So that the leader is the brother, 
and the brother is the leader, and saint is both to saint. 
The communion of saints is a mutual ministry of saints. 
It is a noble thing to think of. Here, and in the antip- 
odes ; here, and in regions of thought and culture utterly 
estranged from ours ; here, and in the lordliest cathedral 
and the lowliest camp-meeting ; here, and in sick-rooms, 
in prisons, in poor-houses, in palaces, the great commun- 
ion reaches. The Hol}^ Catholic Church, the Communion 
of Saints ! Wherever men are praying, loving, trust- 
ing, seeking and finding God, it is a true body with all 
its ministries of part to part. Nay, shall we stop at that 
poor line, the grave, which all our Christianity is always 
trying to wipe out and make nothing of, and which we 
always insist on widening into a great gulf ? Shall we 
not stretch our thought beyond, and feel the life-blood of 
this holy church, this living body of Christ, pulsing out 
into the saints who are living there, and coming back 
throbbing with tidings of their glorious and sympathetic 
life. It is the very power of this truth of ours to-day, 
that it lays hold on immortality. It leaps the gulf of 
death. David and Peter, part of the same body with us, 
already prophesy to us, the more sluggish and tardy 
members, of the great things that are before us, the final 
bright outcome of the struggle in which we are still so 
blindly toiling on ; as the eager eyes send messages down 
to the slow laboring feet, of the green, soft fields before, 
on which they are already feasting, and on which, after a 
little more plodding toil, the tired feet shall rest. What 
we know of Christ becomes in some measure the prop- 
erty of all. 



134 ALL saints' day. 

Angels, and living saints, and dead, 

But one communion make : 
All join in Christ, tlieir vital head, 

And of His love partake. 

The true chnrcli, the only church worth living in or 
fighting for, is this communion of saints. It is the an- 
swer to the Saviour's prayer, " I in them and Thou in Me, 
that they all may be one in us." Oh, when I think of 
what the church really is meaning all this time, — the 
fellowship of faith and goodness everywhere, — it does 
make me indignant to hear how some men talk of it in 
little narrow mechanical phrases, and think that they 
alone do it worthy honor. 

And now do you ask me how can one enter into 
this society ? "I would not stand outside of all this or- 
ganism of holiness and truth. 1 would be in, as well as 
believe in, the ' communion of saints.' " I have spoken 
poorly, indeed, unless you see the answer. The saint 
is he in whom God dwells. But God comes to dwell 
in men, by His Holy Spirit, in the great work of the 
personal regeneration. Do you ask then, " How shall 
I enter in to the company of saints ? " You must yield 
yourself to that power of God which from your birth 
up until now has been waiting at your heart-doors, to 
enter in and fill your nature with itself. You have kept 
your heart full of selfishness. Yon must turn it all 
out, and take God in, and straightway, living by Him 
and for Him, you are one with the living saints and 
dead. Oh, wondrous moment of conversion ! Out to 
the farthest limits of the perfect body there runs the 
tidinsfs of a new member added to the unity. Is it 
strange that " there is joy in heaven ? " This doctrine 
of the communion of the saints alone lets us realize that 



ALL SALNTS' DAY. 135 

text. The saints of old know that the body of their 
Lord, the universal church, is nearer its completion. 
The saints who stand around feel their own spiritual life 
move quicker at the access of this new vitality. The 
whole body knows of it and rejoices with intenser life. 
The man himself, knowing Christ for his, knows all 
Christ's brethren and followers his fellows in the holy 
unity of faith. Oh, wondrous moment of regeneration ! 
Our church rites, our baptisms and confirmations, what 
we call "joining the church," feebly tries to typify the 
great event. If the rites seem to you cold and hollow, 
and do not attract you, is there nothing in this great 
spiritual event to stir your heart, and make you say, " I, 
too, will be a Christian." 

And now ought there not to be a power to hold men 
back from sin in this great truth of all saints ? The 
world seems very wrong and wicked. Vice has the up- 
per hand. All is apparently drifting on from worse to 
worse. Sin has it all its own way. So it seems some- 
times, and the young man says, " What is the use of 
fighting against the current ? I never can do better. 
What is the use of trying ? I must yield at last." And 
just then, what if the clouds can open round him for one 
moment and let him see how in the old times, and to-daj^ 
there always has been, and still is, through all the wick- 
edness, a compact and steady struggle of goodness in the 
world. Let him see the church as representing thus the 
sura of the presence of God in human action, struggling 
and living always, riding the storms, keeping alive the 
name of Christ, and the possibility of holiness among men. 
Let him liear this sainthood of the ages calling to him, 
" Come, come to us, come with us to God." And is there 



136 ALL saints" day. 

not something in him to wliicli that call will appeal to 
spur him to one more attempt to make his escape, to 
burst his chains, to be a good man, and be saved. And 
having once heard that cry,, can he go on and sin, ^vith- 
out feeling, always, that he is doubly obstinate; that he 
is setting himself not merely against God, but against his 
fellows too ; that they are looking on with sorrow and with 
pity, as he goes to his self-chosen ruin ? This is no il- 
legitimate appeal. It does not dishonor the influence of 
God, the heavenly Father, when you plead also with a 
wicked boy, by all the love and high example of his holy 
earthly father or mother, to turn to nobler things. All is 
God's influence, however it is brought to bear. And this 
you must know, — I tell it to you solemnly, — you cannot 
sin as if you were the first and only man that God ever 
made and put into the world. If you will sin, you sin 
against every high precedent of goodness ; you tread on 
those examples of holiness that have made the world 
lustrous and sacred ; you sweep away the inspiration of 
sainthood that comes down out of the past, and gathers 
up around you from the present, like the very breath of 
heaven ; you turn away and go out, obstinately and de- 
liberately, not merely from the kingdom of God, but 
from the communion of saints. May God help you, and 
bring you back. 

And now my woi'k to-night is done if I can bid any of 
you away with this great presence of *the saints of God 
surrounding you. Sin is disintegrating. It breaks up 
and sca,tters fellowships. It makes souls live and die in 
solitude. I appeal to you by all the holy society of 
Christianity. There is holiness all around you to help 
you and inspire you. Yoa will have to suffer in doing 



ALL saints' day. 137 

right. Here are all the martyrs to be your company. 
You must find Christ and be forgiven by Him. Here is 
the multitude who have found Him, each with some story 
of mercy of his own to tell you, till your hopelessness of 
success shall turn into hope as you listen to them in 
spite of yourself. You will need patience. Behold all 
the waiters for God, each at his watching place in all the 
ages. You have bad habits to conquer. Here is the old 
battle-field, and the shouts with which other men who 
have fought down themselves by God's help are hailing 
their victory in Him, shall be the prophecy of your tri- 
umph as you go into the fight. You must not stand 
alone. All this strength is for you. Come in among these 
best souls that believe in and are finding God. I lift the 
words above all low formality that clings to them, and 
say, Come, join the Church. Not in mere outward act, 
but in true inward fellowship. Stand boldly with those 
who are trying to work for God, and willing to suffer for 
God here ; and then in the perfect communion of saints, 
you shall stand at last among that great multitude which 
no man can number, who out of all nations and kindreds 
and people and tongues shall stand before the throne and 
before the Lamb, clad with white robes, and with palms 
in their hands, crying with a loud voice, " Salvation to 
our God, who sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb." 
May God grant it for us all. 



VIII. 

THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

'Then he which hath received the one talent came." — Matt. xxv. 24. 

We must all have reproached ourselves sometimes for 
the difficulty which we found in liking the best people 
best. We wondered why it was. A man who was esti- 
mable in every way, prudent, just, honest, doing all his 
duties faithfully and well, did not interest us. If he pros- 
pered we were not specially glad. If he met with dis- 
aster we could not say that we were sorry. While some 
mere vagabond of fortune, who, doing nothing to deserve 
prosperity, Avas always in ill-luck, has drawn out our 
kindest feeling;. I think that there is somethino; of this 
kind in our feeling about the people in this parable of 
our Lord's. The man with the five talents and the man 
with the two talents come up with their orderly reports. 
They have been faithful and industrious. We know that 
they have deserved the "well-done" that greets them, 
and we look on with calm approval as the}' pass off to 
enter into the joy of their Lord. And then the poor fel- 
low who had received the one talent comes. He brings 
his napkin, a poor show of carefulness that covers up his 
carelessness, and holds it out with his talent in it. We 
hoar his slipshod and cowardly attempt at an excuse. He 
stands forlorn and helpless as the rebuke falls on him, 



THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 139 

and a sort of pity that is close to love springs up in our 
hearts, and makes us mourn for him as he is dragged o£E 
to the outer darkness. 

And a large part of what inclines us to like him and 
such as him is the show of modesty which appears in 
what they have to say about themselves. We shall see 
by and by what their modesty is really worth ; but their 
first defence of their inefficiency sounds modest. "I had 
but one talent," the poor man exclaims, " what could I 
do ? What place for me among the workers and ex- 
changers ? How could I dare to front the world and its 
responsibilities and dangers ? I could have done so little 
even if I had succeeded. What does it matter whether 
such a little brain and such weak hands as mine worked 
or were idle, and so I took the safest and the easiest way. 
Lo, here is thy talent done up in a napkin." How mod- 
est, even if weak, it sounds beside the manly confidence 
which seems touched with pride as it reports : " Lord, 
thou deliveredst unto me five talents ; behold I have 
gained beside them five talents more." 

Let us speak to-day about the one talented men, — the 
men who are crushed and enfeebled by a sense of their 
own insignificance. By and by they become cowardly 
and hide themselves behind their own good-for-nothing- 
ness, away from care, away from effort ; but at first it is 
a mere weakening of the joints and stifling of the cour- 
age by a feeling of how little there is to them, and so that 
whether they do ill or well it is not of much consequence ; 
that any attainment really worth attaining is totally out 
of their reach. What multitudes of such men we see. 
A young man starts with aspirations after culture. He 
will make something out of this brain of his. Very soon 



140 THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

he comes in contact with the great, the wise, the witty 
of his own time and of the past, and then he discovers 
how little brain he really has to cultivate, and he gives 
up in despair. Let him be a drudge and make his money, 
or manage his house, or drive his horses. That is all that 
he is good for. A young man begins to be a Christian. 
Great wide visions of free and exalted thought open be- 
fore him. He will not be a mere traditional believer. He 
will seek devoutl}' to understand his faith, and to send his 
spiritual reason as near as he may to the heart of the great 
problems of God's providence and man's life. How soon 
he finds his thought baffled and gives up, and, saying 
to himself, " Poor fool, what right have such as you to 
think about the high things of religion?" he subsides into 
another of the unthinking routine believers who fill our 
churches. A man is deeply conscious of the misery that 
is in the world. He tries to help it, but when he sees 
how little he can do, how big the bulk of wretchedness 
is against which his poor effort at relief is flung, it seems 
to him so utterly not worth his while that he lets it all 
go, and sinks back into the prudent merchant or the self- 
indulgent philosopher, looking on at woes that he no 
longer tries to help. 

This is the history of so much of the inefficiency of so 
many of the inefficient men that we see about us. These 
men have looked at life and given up in despair. Once, 
long ago, when they were in college, when they first went 
into business, they took their talent out and gazed at it 
and wondered how they should invest in ; but it looked 
so little that they lost all heart, and wrapped it in the 
napkin where it has been ever since, and that is the whole 
story of their useless lives. And yet one thing seems 



THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 141 

clear, that only by the waking up of men like these, 
only by new courage put into their hopelessness, can the 
world really make trustworthy growth. It seems very 
certain that the world is to grow better and richer in the 
future, however it has been in the past, not by the mag- 
nificent achievements of the highly-gifted few, but by the 
patient faithfulness of the one-talented many. If we 
could draw back the curtains of the millennium and look 
in, we should see not a Hercules here and there standing 
on the world-wasting monsters he had killed ; but a world 
fall of men each with an arm of moderate muscle, but 
each triumphant over his own little piece of the obstinacy 
of earth or the ferocity of the brutes. It seems as if the 
heroes had done almost all for the world that they can 
do, and not much more can come till common men awake 
and take their common tasks. I do believe the common 
man's task is the hardest. The hero has the hero's as- 
piration that lifts him to his labor. All great duties are 
easier than the little ones, though they cost far more 
blood and agony. That is a truth we all find out. And 
this is part of the reason why we make allowance for our 
poor friend in the parable. But if we look at it in a 
higher way, surely we may come to feel that the very cer- 
tainty that the world must be saved by the faithfulness 
of commonplace people is what is needed to rescue such 
people from commonplaceness in their own eyes, and 
clothe their lives with the dignity which they seem so 
wofully to lack, and which, if any man does not see some- 
where shining through the rusty texture of his life, he 
cannot live it well. 

But we may go deeper than this into the causes and 
the cure of that self-disgust which makes a man think it 



142 THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

not worth while to try to do anything in the world. The 
real root of it is in the very presence of self -consciousness 
at all. Any man who is good for anything, if he is al- 
ways thinking about himself, will come to think himself 
good for nothing very soon. It is only a fop or a fool 
who can bear to look at himself all day long, without 
disgust. And so the first thing for a man to do, who 
wants to use his best powers at their best, is to get rid of 
self-consciousness, to stop thinking about himself and how 
he is working, altogether. Ah, that is so easy to say and 
so hard to do ! Of course it is ; but there are two pow- 
ers which God put into the human breast at the begin- 
ning, whose very purpose is to help men do just this. 
These are the power of loving and working for an abso- 
lute duty, and the power of loving and working for our 
fellow-men. In those two powers lies man's hope to be 
rescued from self-consciousness, with all its curses. These 
are the champions that take a man's heavy self off from 
him when it is getting him down. A man is testing his 
powers, wondering whether he can do this, wondering 
whether he can do that, almost despairing when he sees 
how little he can do. He is lost if he goes on in that 
way ; but then he suddenly discovers that a thing is 
right and must be done, or the cry of a world, or of a 
fellow-man, that must have help, rises up and appals 
him, and the man no longer thinks whether he is strong 
enough, any more than the mother lion thinks whether it 
is worth while for her to try, when she springs to help 
her cub who must be rescued. When a man becomes 
aware of these great necessities, he is rescued from the 
consideration of himself altogether. The despotism of 
such a necessity sets him free, and he just goes and does 



THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 143 

what must be done with all his might. This is the history 
of every brave effective man that ever lived. Moses, Lu- 
ther, Cromwell, every one of them dallied with the cor- 
ners of the napkin, and almost folded up the talent ; but 
the call was too strong, and each forgot his weakness and 
went and worked his fragment of the world's salvation. 

I know the answer that suggests itself at once. " These 
motives are strong enough," you say, " when they are felt. 
Let them take hold of a man, and they will save him. 
But the trouble is that they cannot save common men, 
because common men will not feel them. They are too 
abstract and too high." And there is truth in that. And 
to relieve that difficulty something else comes in. These 
abstract and far-off necessities are taken up and embod- 
ied in a new necessity which every man can feel. That 
new necessity is a personal God. Appealing to the sim- 
plest feelings, full of His love, mighty with all the obliga- 
tion of His fatherhood and mercy, God takes the abstract 
right and the duties of a half-felt human brotherhood, and 
blends them both into obedience to Him. The absolute 
necessity that we should do His will becomes the despot 
of the life. He may be real to the most feebly perceptive 
of His children. His is a voice which, stern with majesty, 
may find its way into the dullest ears. And when He 
finds a sluggish soul and claims it. He is that soul's res- 
cue from self-consciousness, and self-measurement, and 
self-disecust. He sets a man free from himself. " I will 
walk at liberty, for I keep thy commandments." That 
is at least one meaning of that profound cry of David's. 
This is the truth of all this parable. " Thou knewest 
me, thy master, therefore thou shouidst have worked ! " 
How often it has come ! How many men have forgotten 



144: THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

themselves when they saw God I Oh, wonderful release I 
You who are wishing you could do a thing you ought to 
do, and hiding behind your weakness ; you must hear 
God saying, " Do it ! " and feel the necessity of obeying 
Him, the joy of pleasing Him run through your being 
like the strong blood of a new life ; and then, then only, 
you are on your feet, and the impossible thing is done. 
You will not stop then to ask whether you can do it till 
you feel upon your head the crown of victory. And then 
3'ou will take that crown off and cast it at His feet, for 
you will know that really He did it and not you. 

Does not this turn the tables entirely ? If this sort of 
inefficiency has its root in self-consciousness, if it can be 
released only by forgetfulness of self, what has become 
of the modesty which we thought we saw in the man's 
face, who came up with his feeble excuse for his unprof- 
itable talent ? It is only a thin-veiled pride, not modesty 
at all. And he who comes with all his faithful work, 
and offers it to the Lord by whom alone he did it — his 
is the true humility. I beg you to think of this and feel 
it. If you are hiding yourself behind your commonness 
and littleness, come out ! That shelter is a citadel of 
pride. Come out, and take the work that God has given 
you. Do it for Him and by Him. Cease to parade your 
feebleness. Work in His light, and so escape the outer 
darkness. 

And now that I have said thus much in general, there 
is one special application of our subject which interests 
me very deeply, and I should like to narrow our view to 
that, and deal with it a little more particularly. Of all 
the powers of which men easily think that they are 
wholly or almost destitute, and so from whose exercise 



THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 145 

they think themselves excused, the one most commonly 
alleged, I think, is the religious power, the whole spirit- 
ual faculty in geuei'al. How familiar it all sounds from 
constant repetition. A man says, " I know that people 
are religious. It is no fancy ; it is a reality with them. 
I know their souls do apprehend a supernatural. They 
live in the presence of spiritual forces which they never 
see. Eternity is as real to them as time. They love 
God ; they serve Chi'ist ; and the Holy Spirit, the Lord 
and Giver of Life, is with them and in them constantly. 
But for me, simply, all this is impossible. I have no 
spiritual capacity. It is like asking me to use a sense I 
have not got ; like asking a blind man to see, when you 
ask me to be religious. I can take only what the senses 
set before me. I can believe intensely onl}^ what I see." 
And so, not scoffingly, but sadly, he counts himself to- 
tally outside the possibility of all the joy and all the 
culture which he knows comes to his brethren out of 
the spiritual life, the life of faith. 

When I see such a man, all thought of indignation in 
my mind passes off entirely, and a profound pity, a com- 
plete sense of what he might be, and of what he is 
losing, takes possession of me. It is too serious a matter 
for mere indignation. I may be angry with a man who 
might carve statues and paint pictures, if he spent his 
life in making mock flowers out of wax and paper ; but 
when a man who might have God for company shuts up 
and disowns those doors of his nature through which God 
can enter, and lives the emptied life which every man 
lives who lives without God, his loss is too dreadful to be 
angry with. You merely mourn for him, and long and 
try to help him if you can. 

10 



146 THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

And what shall we say of this phenomenon ? The 
first thing that we must say will be this : That religion 
to that man has, in all probability, been wrongly put. 
Some temporary, accidental, special form of spiritual life 
has been set up before him, either by himself or by some 
one to whom he has listened, as if it were eternal and es- 
sential. He has looked at that, and said, truly, that there 
was nothing in him that could live such a life as that. 
And so because men said, narrowly, that to be that was 
to be religious, he has said that there was no possibility 
of religion for him, while all the time there slept in his 
nature a rich capacity for some new characteristic type of 
spiritual force, which, once set free, should flower into 
luxuriant beauty, and glorify the world. The man has 
not got hold of the heart of religion at all, only of some- 
body's special embodiment of it, and sunk back, heart- 
less, because he could not copy that. In the old days, 
when the accepted type of saintship was found in con- 
templative mortals who grew haggard on the tops of 
lofty columns, or starved in the caves of desolate mount- 
ains, a brave, full-blooded man, eager for work, and lit- 
tle capable of speculation, might well conclude that he 
could never be a saint. Two centuries ago a man full of 
the precious love of Christ, who was told, according to 
the intense error of the time, that he could not love 
Christ truly unless he was willing to give up his hope of 
happiness in Him forever, might well have settled down 
on the conviction that for him the love of Jesus, whom he 
longed to love, was impossible. Nowadays, if to woi-ship 
is made to mean to worship in a certain way, either with 
an invariable richness, or an invariable simplicity of lit- 
urgy, there will always be multitudes who reluctantly 



THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 147 

feel that they were not made to worship at all. After 
all, the fatal fault, the fault that makes one glow most 
earnestly into hatred of the narrowness of sectarianism, 
the making that essential which is only accidental, the 
confining of Christianity to this or that form of Christian 
life, is that it throws off thousands of earnest men and 
women who cannot be Christians after that accepted type, 
and makes them straightway conclude that for them there 
is no Christianity at all. Worse even than the stifling of 
the souls within it, by a narrow church, is the starving of 
the souls without it who have a right to all the richness 
of religion which religious narrowness involves. 

But if he feels this, then the earnest man who believes 
that all men have in them the capacity for Christianity 
which many of them are leaving unused because of their 
incapacity for certain of its special forms, sets himself 
seriously to asking what is there that is universal and es- 
sential, and so really in all men's power. All men will 
not be Calvinists, or Quakers, or Methodists, or Episco- 
palians. But underneath and through them all there is 
something which every man may reach and fasten him- 
self to, and be a Christian under some form or other. 
What is that something ? What will the soul be that 
finds it ? To ask that question is to go back through the 
dark tortuous ravines of church history, up onto that 
broad, open table-land of the New Testament, from 
which all the ravines come down. There it becomes all 
plain. The man who is a Christian there, with Peter, 
with John, nay with Jesus, will be a man, spiritual, rev- 
erent, and penitent. That is the heart of the matter; 
he will be conscious of his own soul and its capacities ; 
conscious of God, and full of humble love to Him ; con- 



148 THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

scions of his sin and hnmbly dependent upon Christ for 
forgiveness and for help. Some things he will know are 
not universal ; he will feel his soul bearing witness of 
itself on whatever may be its most sensitive and needy 
side; he will cling to what attribute or attitude of God 
most nearly and powerfully touches him ; he will seem 
to see this or that method, or sort of efficacy in the work 
and life of Christ. On all these things he will be him- 
self ; none of these things will be the substance of his 
religion. But the great facts that he was not born to 
die, that there is a God who loves him and whom he 
may love, that that God has manifested Himself in the 
Christ, who will forgive him, and help him, and save 
him, if he trusts in Him, this is his religion ; and when 
this comes to his soul, and the nature which has been try- 
ing to comprehend puzzling doctrines and shape itself 
into the figure of hard forms, just finds the simplicity of 
the whole thing, and rests with utter satisfaction on the 
profoundness of the divine life, and the richness of the 
divine love ; then who shall tell with what surprised de- 
light the impossible opens into the possible, and the 
spirituality which has been trying to warm itself at the 
moonlight, and has concluded that it has no capacity for 
warmth, sees the great sun arise and fills itself with great 
heartf uls of his heat ? 

Is this true ? Am I right in thinking that the reason 
why many people are not Christians is that they misrep- 
resent Christianity to themselves, that they have not 
conceived its simplicity ? Am I right when I believe 
that there is in every man the power to take it in this 
simplicity and make it his new life ? I do believe so 
fully, and for various reasons. The first reason of all is 



THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 14P 

one that is no reason except to him who is already a be- 
liever, but surely to him it must come very strongly. 
It does seem to me that no man can really seem to him- 
self to be living a spiritual life, and not hold with all his 
heart as a possibility, and long to see realized as a fact, 
the spiritual life in every soul of every son of man. If 
I truly thought that there was any one man who really 
was, as so many men have told me that they were, inca- 
pable of spirituality, bound down inevitably to carnal- 
ity and the drudgery of material life, I should lose my 
whole faith in the capacity of spirituality in any man. 
The whole would melt and flutter off into a thin dreamy 
dekision. I think that that same character of God which 
makes it possible for Him to give the spiritual life to any 
of His children, makes it necessary that He should give 
the free opportunity of the same spiritual life to all His 
children. I am sure that there are men enough in 
Africa, in Asia, out in the wigwams, nay, right here by 
my side, to whom many of the statements of truth which 
are dear to me are and always will be unintelligible ; 
many of the forms of worship which are rich to me are 
and always will be barren. To know that does not 
trouble me ; but to know that there was anywhere on 
God's earth a human being who was, and necessarily 
always must be, incapable of the sense of soul, the love 
for God, the repentance of sin, the reliance of salvation, 
I could not know that and yet believe in God. 

2. And then another reason why we have a right to 
believe that there is in every man a capacity for this fun- 
damental and essential Christianity lies in the fact that 
the activities of such a Christianity reall}' demand only 
those powers which in ordinary human life we all hold 



loO THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

to be absolutely universal. In higher degrees, straining 
them to loftier reaches, refining them, exalting them un- 
speakably, yet still keeping their essence unimpaired, re- 
ligion takes the powers that belong to all men, and makes 
them the instruments of her sublimest tasks. When we 
shall find a man who is entirely incapable of realizing 
"what he has never seen, entirely unable to answer love 
with a responsive gratitude, entirely unsensitive to the 
sorrowfulness of doing wrong; a man, T say, not who has 
not all these powers at their best, but a man who has no 
spark of them to fan to life, no seed of them to foster and 
to ripen ; then we have found a man of whom it will be 
as impossible to make a Christian as it would be to make 
a Christian of a mountain or a tree. But these simple 
first powers are just what in their universality character- 
ize our humanity. It is largely by their possession that 
we know a man from a piece of wood or stone carved in 
the human likeness. These powers are in all humanity, 
and according to the richness with which they inhabit and 
inspire it, humanity becomes more truly human. These 
are the powers that play through life and make its 
poetry, that breathe through histor}^ and make the music 
to which the centuries move and by which they know 
each other's deeper life. They are the soul of human 
character, the bond of human brotherhood. They make 
the beauty of the family, the majesty of the state. They 
culminate in Christianity and make it seem to be indeed 
the great faith of humanity, — the land of spiritual truth 
in which each man by his pure humanity has a true place. 
3. If thus the spiritual life is something not strange 
in its essence, but familiar; if its working force consists 
of the simplest and most fundamental of the powers of 



THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 151 

humanity brought into contact with and filled full of a 
divine influence, then another thing which we see con- 
tinually is not strange. And this other thing constitutes 
another reason for believing that in every man the capac- 
ity of tlie spiritual life abides, hidden if it is not seen, 
sleeping if it is not awake. There are certain experi- 
ences in every life which have their power just in this, 
that they break through the elaborate surface, and get 
down to the simplest thoughts and emotions of the hu- 
man heart. Great sickness, sudden bereavement, great 
jo}^, intense love or enthusiasm, fatherhood, the near sight 
of death, — all of these supreme experiences of life are 
characterized by the breadth, the largeness of the sim- 
ple thoughts and feelings they awaken. In them you 
have the crust broken to fragments, and the great heart 
of the life laid open. And if that heart, laid open, is 
inevitabl}^, universally spiritual ; if, as we always see in 
these supreme moments of the life, a soul- most vividly 
asserts itself, and the man insists upon another world and 
on a God, and takes the story of the Christhood into his 
heart with hungry eagerness, what does it prove but this, 
that when the simplest base of any man's life is readied, 
when the ground above it is torn off by an earthquake, 
or melted bare by the sunshine of happiness, there is the 
capacity for spirituality, the soil in which the spiritual 
seed must grow. When I see what we see so often, the 
man in great trouble or great joy grown suddenly relig- 
ious, the glad " Tliank God ! " or the agonized " God help 
me ! " bursting out of unaccustomed lips, I think it does 
not mean desperation, and it does not mean hypocrisy. 
It means that for once in that man's life the true soil of 
his nature has been laid bare, and it has claimed the di- 



152 THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

vine relations for which it was made; just as you strip 
the layer of rock off from a bed of earth that lay below 
it, and in a day the newly exposed earth is sprouting all 
over with grass that you never planted. It has caught 
the grass seeds out of the air. The wandering birds have 
brought them to it. It has found them treasured in it- 
self. It puts forth upon them its own simple nature, and 
grows green from side to side. The man's hard surface 
may close over when the great agony or the great joy is 
past, and all may seem just as before, but he who once 
has known the movements of this new capacity never 
can think of himself as he was used to think. He must 
remember. He may go on living a most earthly life, but 
he knows forever that there is a spiritual heaven and a 
spiritual hell. He never can say of himself again, " I 
have no spiritual capacity." He has discovered what he 
often has denied. New regions of joy and sorrow, both 
infinite, have, opened to his sight around, beyond the 
poor vexations and amazements of his daily life. He 
has looked upon God, and his soul never can forget how 
it answered when it met the gaze of the love and power 
which made it, and for which it was made. 

4. But all these indications of the universal spiritual 
capacity in man seem to me, after all, only to be leading 
up to one consummate exhibition. I wish that I could set 
that consummate exhibition worthily before you. To the 
believer in the New Testament the Incarnation of Christ 
must stand as the supreme event of history. Whatever 
it meant must be the deepest truth that man can know. 
And, amid all the various speculations and opinions about 
Christ's person, all believers in Him agree in this : that 
He most perfectly represented the type of human life ; 



THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 153 

not a humanity exceptional in its qualities, but the true 
human, drawn in lines of exceptional light and fire, but 
recognizable still by every man who deeply studied his 
own nature. Here is the first unshaken power of that 
wonderful life. The Jew and the Saxon have found the 
man of Nazareth their brother. The man of the first 
century and the man of the nineteenth have found in 
Him the interpretation of themselves. The hero on the 
battle-field, the martyr at the stake, the school-boy at his 
desk, the mother in her anxieties, all pour out to Him 
their fears, and draw out from Him their courage. What 
is most wonderful, even in a sti'uggle with sin, the sinless 
man does not fail his human brethren ; and the paths up 
the mountain of the temptation, and into the garden of 
Gethsemane, are worn with the feet of men and women 
going to gather from His struggles the power of victory 
over the terrors and weaknesses that are besetting them. 
And now it must be forever a fact of unspeakable impor- 
tance that when the typal man appeared, he was not only 
one who hungered and who thirsted, who loved and hated, 
who dreaded and hoped, who suffered and enjoyed, but 
he was one whose nature leaped beyond the mere mate- 
rial and grasped the spiritual. He was one who loved 
God. He was one who felt sin and shuddered at its touch. 
If in the Incarnation I behold the elevation of the lowest 
faculties of man, I cannot help seeing, too, the naturaliza- 
tion, the familiarizing of the highest. Just suppose that 
we stood back before the birth of Christ. We knew that 
He was coming. We knew that one was to be born who, 
while He should represent our humanity at its best, would 
yet represent our humanity perfectly. How we should 
have watched for Him. When He comes we shall know 



154 THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

what this strange puzzle of humanity means. When He 
comes we shall know what man is, and so what men shall 
be. At last He comes! Here is the unmistakable hu- 
manity'. Here is the baby's weakness, the boy's growth. 
Here are the appetites, the passions, that we know so 
well. But here, clear from the earliest consciousness and 
growing with His growth, there is the consuming appe- 
tite of spirituality. This representative man is a man 
who sees all material things only as the means of spirit- 
ual culture, to whom immortality is a first fact of human 
existence, to whom God is more real than his brethren, 
to whom sin is the one evil of all the gi'oaning and com- 
plaining world. And when, staggered by such a preva- 
lence and strength of what is rare and feeble in the 
humanity we know, our faith in His representativeness 
is shaken, and we begin to say, " He cannot represent us 
now. These must be qualities in Him that we can have 
no share in. He cannot expect us, certainly not all of us, 
to be like Him here." He answers, "No! I will not be 
cut off from you, my brethren." He cries to all men, 
" Follow me ! Take my yoke upon you, and learn of 
me. So only can you find rest unto your souls. I go to 
my Father and to your Father ! Yours as well as mine." 
By every type and symbol, by every degradation of the 
outward life down to the level of His lowest children, by 
the eager avoidance of everything which might seem to 
associate Him in limited sympathy with any part or por- 
tion of mankind. He was forever claiming the whole hu- 
manity for His great purposes and standards. He was 
forever crying, as He cried there in the temple, " If any 
man thirst, let him come unto me and drink." 

That was tlie Incarnation. That was the Christ who 



THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 155 

oame ! To believe in the Incarnation, really to under- 
stand that Christ, and yet to think that we or any other 
men in all the world are essentially incapable of spiritual 
living, is an impossibility. It is through Him that mill- 
ions of men have come, as He said that they should come, 
to the Father. See what that means. Millions of men 
have seen in Him first what they were meant for, have 
believed in their own spiritual capacity by the convic- 
tion of His life, and then, believing that they could, they 
have lived the life that He lived; not stopped the storms 
or raised the dead; those were but external forms of 
operation ; but entered into the joy of the Lord, the re- 
liance upon spiritual truth, the certainty of spiritual priv- 
ilege, which was His life. 

In face of all that I behold in man, in face especially 
of all that I behold in this man who shows humanity to 
itself, I do not know how to believe that there is any man 
living who is incapable of spiritual life ; any man who 
may not know and value his own soul ; know and love 
God ; know and dread and repent of sin. I may under- 
stand that this or that expression of spii'ituality in dogma, 
this or that incorporation of spirituality in formal ceremo- 
nies, is unintelligible, unattainable by you ; but that does 
not justify you in giving up the thought of spirituality 
altogether and living a carnal life. Somewhere, for your 
soul, there is an entrance into that love of God for which 
all our souls were made, and for which the Son of God 
claimed them all. It may be, nay, in the deepest sense, 
it must be that your way is new, — a different spiritual 
career leading into a different spiritual attainment from 
any that any man ever followed or attained before. Do 
not stunt your own growth, do not hamper the free grace 



156 THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT. 

of God by making up your mind beforehand what kind of 
a Christian you must be. There is a faith which, out of 
all the world, and, above all, out of Christ, gathers a per- 
fect conviction that the soul is divine, and can come to 
its God ; then faithfully takes the next step towards Him 
by the faithful doing of the next known duty, the faith- 
ful acceptance of the next opened truth ; and so choosing 
no way for itself, but only sure that it is God's, and that 
God is leading it, ever advances in His growing light and 
comes at last to Him. Such faith may Christ increase 
in us. 

Let us do what we ought and what we can for our own 
souls at once. For the judgment is coming not only at 
the last day, but all the time. Every day the power that 
we will not use is failing from us. Every day the God 
whose voice speaks through all the inevitable necessities 
of our moral life is saying of the men who keep their tal- 
ents wrapped in napkins, " Take the talent from him ; " 
and since he will not enter into the perfect light he must 
be " cast into the outer darkness." 



IX. 

THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 
A THANKSGIVING SEEMON. 

" When the Son of Man cometh shall He find faith on the earth ? " — 
Luke xviii. 8. 

I WELCOME you, this morning, to the time-honored ob- 
servance of Thanksgiving Day. Generation after genera- 
tion has taken up the pious institution of our fathers, and 
found in it the fit expression of their own experiences and 
desires. And the first conviction with which we certainly 
must greet each new Thanksgiving Day must be that it 
belongs to us, and that if we are to be really thankful, it 
must be for mercies which we ourselves are receiving, 
and with reference to the circumstances under which we 
live. No day in all the year so demands to be surrounded 
with its own local scenery. No service so requires to be 
timely. And therefore one is always led, in thinking 
what he shall say to the people on Thanksgiving Day, to 
desire to speak peculiarly of the time in which he and 
the people are living, and to point out the causes of 
thankfulness, the thoughts, the lessons, and the warn- 
ings which are involved in the social, the political, or the 
religious conditions which are right around us. 

With this feeling, I should like to say a few words this 
morning upon the religious conditions with which we are 



158 THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 

all more or less familiar. I am led to think and speak of 
the disturbed condition of faith in our time. No subject 
is more pressing. Even the most careless man's thoughts 
rest veiy much upon it. It is discussed and talked of 
everywhere. And it is most important. One may very 
clearly say, that if there is no cause for gratitude and 
hope in the state of religious life, then, whatever other 
blessings may be showered out around us, to the deepest 
sense, and to the most serious men, a Thanksgiving Day 
becomes a mockery. Let us see then what there is that 
we can understand about the disturbed and tumultuous 
faith of our strange tiuies. 

" When the Son of INIan cometh shall He find faith on 
the earth ? " was Jesus's question. There have always 
been two different opinions among people who looked for 
a final perfection of all things under the Christian faith. 
One class of men has held that the perfecting state of 
things was already begun, and that everything would go 
on developing and improving till the glorious consumma- 
tion should be reached. The other class has always held 
that matters were continually getting worse and worse, 
and must go on decaying and degenerating until they 
touched the bottom of corruption, and then by some law 
of reaction and replacement an upward movement must 
begin, and perfection speedily arrive. It is one of the 
strangest things, I think, about the world and its history, 
that the advocates of each of these opinions have alike 
been able to find corroboration of what they believed in 
the things about them. One man has waved his hand 
enthusiastically over human history, and said, " See how 
everything is improving. It will be perfect before long. 
It has only to keep on." Another man standing riglit 



THE I'RESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 159 

by bis side, pointing to the same history, says, " Yon see 
that everything is getting worse and worse. The only 
hope is that it will get as bad as possible, and be de- 
stroyed, and then something better can come in." And 
the strange thing is that both of them find in the self- 
same world abundant confirmations of their theories. 
The facts must be very remarkably involved and mixed 
out of which two such different inferences can be drawn, 
on which two such different anticipations can be built. 

And this double interpretation of human history does 
not come merely from the different characters of differ- 
ent ages. Both theories find confirmation in every age. 
Both are confiimed by some things that men see in this 
age of ours. While we speak of the darker symptoms, 
the signs of decaying faith in our own time, we must not 
forget tliat there are other symptoms of a brigliter sort 
which make men hopeful of the future of their race, — 
more hopeful, probably, in these anxious days than men 
have ever been before. Let us bear this in mind. 

The lack of faith, or the disturbance of faith, which is 
such a serious feature of our times, is very manifold and 
puzzling in its influences, but is very simple in its nature 
and causes. It is traceable, almost everywhere, to the 
wonderful increase of men's knowledge of second causes, 
interfering with, or overclouding their belief in first 
causes, in principles, in providences, in a personal and 
loving care back of everything. It comes to many things, 
but this is where it all comes from. This is where lies 
the certain amount of truth which is in the statement 
that times of ignorance are times of faith. No doubt it 
is easier for men who have learned nothing: of the mar- 
vellous way in which every object in nature is made a 



100 THE ITtESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 

reservoir and a distributer of force, to look back straight 
into the face of the Sovereign Will out of which all force 
originally proceeds. It is easier for the savage, with his 
chief standing over him, ready to strike him down with 
his club if he disobeys, to realize and believe in govern- 
ment, than it is for the citizen of a highly organized 
state who is reached by the authority which is at the 
head of all only through many subordinate agencies and 
by nicely adjusted relationships. So that there is some 
truth in the statement that much knowledge and elabo- 
rate life are dangerous to faith in final principles and 
forces. The more our mind is fastened upon second 
causes, the more danger there is that it will fail to reach 
the great first cause. It is a danger to be met, not one 
to be avoided ; but it is one, in the first place, to be rec- 
ognized very clearly. I need not try to tell the magnifi- 
cent story of how natural science has brought out the 
starry host of second causes from their obscurity, and 
shown how He who works everything, works by every- 
thing in all the world. We all know something of it ; 
and we know, too, how the profuse discovery of means 
has in our times clouded the thought of the maker in 
many minds. We know this, and I need not dwell on it. 
But I am anxious to point out that there are other skep- 
ticisms, other derangements of faith besides those which 
belong to the region of natural science, which yet have 
essentiall}^ the same character and origin. It may sound 
strange and fanciful to say that those two evils of which 
we hear so much, corruption in political life and formal- 
ism in church life, are really one, at bottom, with the sci- 
entific skepticism of our time ; but if one looks at them 
philosophically he must see that it is truly so. Corrup- 



THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 161 

tion in political life is really skepticism. It is a distrust, 
a disuse which has lasted so long that it has grown into 
disbelief of political principles, of the first fundamen- 
tal truths of the sacredness of government and the ne- 
cessity of righteousness. And where has such a disbe- 
lief come from? We all know well enough. It is from 
the narrow view which has looked at machineries, and 
magnified them till they have hid from view^ the great 
purposes for which all machineries exist. If a man tells 
me that it is absolutely necessary that such or such a 
political party should be maintained whether its acts and 
its men are righteous or uni-ighteous, or else the govern- 
ment will fall, that man is an unbeliever. He has lost 
his faith in the first principles of government, and he 
has lost it by persistently tying down his study and his 
soul to second causes, to the mere machinery of party. 
And so in church and religious matters, when they are 
invaded by formalism. When a man tells me that re- 
ligion cannot stand unless the church be just so organ- 
ized, or that God will be lost out of men's thoughts un- 
less you teach certain traditional things about Him, and 
worship Him with a certain ritual, that man seems to 
me to be an unbeliever of the most dangerous kind. He 
has lost his real faith in God and Christianity and the 
church by his very devotion to the means, or second 
causes, through which they work. When I heard an 
English bishop preach, this summer, that it was neces- 
sary to maintain a particular mode of burying the dead, 
for fear of disturbing men's belief in the doctrine of the 
resurrection of the body, that preaching seemed to me to 
indicate a lack of faith in the real essential truth and 
power of the doctrine, which could not be surpassed by 

11 



1G2 THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 

any skeptic. Aud so it is alwaj's. Oar jealousy for cer- 
tain forms, our magnifying their importance, our fear 
that Christianity will not stand if we do not state and 
utter it just so, — what is it all at the bottom but a lack 
of faith in Christianity itself, in its vital power and its 
original truth ? Dogmatism and ritualism are all wrong 
when they think themselves supremely believing. Both 
are really symptomatic forms of unbelief. Whenever a 
man believes that only his machinery can save the na- 
tion or the church, he is a disbeliever in the vital force by 
which the nation or the church lives. 

Have we not here, then, the general character of the 
unbelief or feeble faith of this strange century in which 
we live ? It is that which naturally belongs to a much 
discovering, much questioning, much reading age, an age 
critical and inquisitive. It comes from such a multipli- 
cation of details and methods as hides principles and 
purposes out of sight. The naturalist is so busy with the 
system of nature that he rests there, and loses God. The 
politician is so busy with the machinery of party that he 
stops there, and loses patriotism and justice. The wor- 
shipper is so busy with the details of worship that he lives 
in them, and loses Christ. In all you see it is essentially 
the same, — the disbelief of a critical and cultured time. 
That it is different from the disbelief of other times there 
can be no doubt. It is more subtle, more serious, and so 
perhaps more persistent aiid dangerous. When we say 
that it is more widespread we are very apt to be deceived. 
We are apt to think that our time has less faith than the 
ages that have gone before, but such an opinion very com- 
monly comes from some idealizing of the past. The world 
is like a growing man in many ways. It looks back to 



THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 163 

its childhood, and sees that chiWhood flooded with a glory 
which it did not have when it was present. As it seems to 
every man as if his boyhood were more religious than his 
manhood has become, so it seems to the world always as 
if there were some past age, some blessed time, primitive 
or mediaeval, when faith was universal, calm, and abso- 
lute. Both are mere dreams. You cannot find the ages 
of faith if you look cai'efuUy back through history. The 
disturbances of faith in other times have been different 
from ours, but there have always been disturbances, and 
whether they have been greater or less than ours no man 
can say ; for who can really know the mental troubles of 
any other time except his own ? 

I am inclined to think that such a statement of the 
character of our time and of the nature of its skepticism 
will not satisfy many people. I think that many people 
are under the impression, not merely that certain causes 
have turned aside the power of implicit faith from its 
true objects, but that the whole power of enthusiastic 
faitli is sick, if indeed it be not dead. They point us 
to the prosaicalness of everything. They complain that 
there is nothing noble. They would depict their century 
as if it were given up entirely to low economies, merely 
prudent, safe, scheming, well-to-do, with nothing of the 
romantic generosity and enterprise of other days. " That 
is what is really at the bottom of the decay of r^iligious 
and political faith," they say. So I suppose every age 
has looked to the men who lived in it. But when we ask 
whether such a charge is really true about the age we 
live in, I think we are surprised to find how astonish- 
ingly untrue it is. It seems as if there had hardly ever 
been any century which would send down into history 



164 THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 

more romantic passages, more heroic and poetic deeds, 
than just this prosaic nineteenth century in which wehve. 
We are astonished when we count them over. When we 
think of the adventure of our time ; when we recall the 
great Arctic explorations that have called forth an endur- 
ance and daring which have been unsurpassed in other 
days ; when we remember the picturesque meetings of 
strange peoples, which the advance of civilization has 
brought about, — the meeting of England and Russia face 
to face in Central Asia, the meeting of Anglo-Saxon and 
Chinaman on the Pacific shore, the meeting of New Eng- 
lander and Indian upon the prairies ; when we consider 
the history of slavery in this country with all the passion- 
ate experience that it created, the tragedies of private life, 
the miracles of self-devotion, and the convulsive revolution 
with which it shook the land ; when we consider these 
things and a thousand others, what is there that is more 
romantic than they are in any history of any age ? What 
is there anywhere more poetic, anything that more ap- 
peals to the imagination than the brilliant advance of nat- 
ural science ? What is there in chivalry more exalted and 
thrilling than the lives of men who have lived and died in 
privation and delight for science and its progress ? When 
have men ever proved themselves more capable of lofty 
and large ideas than in these days, when they are dream- 
ing of a." federation of mankind," war replaced by peace- 
ful arbitration, and criminals reformed by industry and 
kindness, and poverty obliterated by universal organized 
charity ? No crusade of the middle ages has anything 
like the real romantic inspiration that belongs to the 
modern crusade against ignorance, — the dream of uni- 
versal education. No old vision of a splendid feudalism 



TUE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 165 

SO taxed and exalted the imagination as the modern 
picture of self-government. No ! It is not that our age 
is sordid. It is not that it has proved itself incapable 
of large ideas and glowing visions. It has a romance 
brighter than any other age ever possessed. And so long 
as it has that, it has not lost the capacity of faith, — the 
appetite and love for the unseen and transcendental. 

Let us sum up, then, some of the characteristics of our 
confused time. It is certainly one of the most interesting 
times in which a man could have been sent into the world 
to live. It is full of contradictions. On the one hand, 
it has accumulated an immense knowledge of details and 
second causes which have made it hard to look beyond to 
principles and the first origin of things. On the other 
hand, it has struggled with the principles of life with most 
ambitious curiosity. It combines immense material de- 
velopment with great susceptibility to spiritual influences. 
It has disowned the older forms of authoritj'^, so that the 
thunders of a Roman anathema peal harmlessly through 
its clear atmosphere, and at the same time it has become 
so conscious of the largeness of truth that it is willing to 
listen to almost any confident charlatan who claims to be 
its teacher, — the most practical and the most visionary, 
the most hard-headed and the most soft-hearted, the most 
positive and the most perplexed, the most desponding 
and the most eager, the most independent and the most 
credulous of all the ages that the world has seen. 

We are in the habit of hearing all this character of our 
age summed up in the statement that it is a "■ transition 
time." It rather gets its character from its relation to 
what has gone before it, and what is to come after it, 
than from "wliat it contains within itself. This is what 



166 THE PEESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 

gives it so much of an aspect of restlessness and unquiet. 
It is full of the sense of having in many ways broken 
with the past, and of having not yet thoroughly appre- 
hended the future that is to come. It is not the happiest 
frame of life. The description that one of its thinkers, 
the subtlest and most characteristic perhaps of all of 
them, has given of himself tells well enough the story of 
the age, — 

" Wandering between two worlds, one dead 
The other powerless to be born, 
"With nowhere yet to rest my head 
Like these on earth I wait forlorn." 

And yet the forlornness of such a mood is always 
brightened by the persistent conviction that there is a 
future, and that what there is to come, hard as it is to ap- 
prehend, will certainly be apprehended some day. If we 
described the whole life of the world, as has often been 
done, as if it were the continuous life of one growing 
man, this age of ours must correspond, we think, just to 
the point where youth is passing into manhood. Our 
world now seems to me to be wonderfully like a high- 
spirited young man of twenty-one years old. It is just 
coming of age. It has all the characters and moods that 
belong to that most interesting and perplexing creature. 
It has all his remonstrance against the tyranny of the 
past; air his self-confidence, and at the same time all his 
self-disgusts ; all his self-reliance, with yet all his feeble- 
ness ; his hope, his petulance, his self-indulgence : his crav- 
ing for the definite, and his delight in what is vague; his 
passion for the real and the ideal together; liis satisfaction 
in the present, and at the same time his eager and imjia- 
tient expectation of what is to come ; full of silent moods 



THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 167 

and yet full of exuberant spirits; reckless and defiant, yet 
wonderfully capable of tenderness. Altogether the same 
unsatisfied, unsatisfactory, and interesting creature. 

And now of your young man of twenty-one wdiat do 
you expect ? , Interesting as he is, he cannot stay what he 
is; and certainly he cannot go back into any of the lost 
conditions of his boyhood and his babyhood again. He 
must go forward; all these new thoughts and passions 
which have come into him since he was fifteen, and which 
now are seething in confusion, must find their places and 
proportions to one another, and a new peace of higher 
adjustments must come, — the peace of harmonized and 
well balanced manhood. And just exactly so it must be 
with our twenty-one years' old world. An age of transi- 
tion of course is temporary. It cannot stay just w'hat it 
is. An everlasting nineteenth century would be intolera- 
ble. But on the other hand it cannot go back into boy- 
hood or babyhood again. The man who, tired of the 
freedom of individual thought, w^ants to push the church 
back into the peace of mere authoritative and traditional 
religion, and the man who, tired of the noise and confu- 
sion of popular govcMument, wishes to push mau back into 
feudalism, both are mistaken and neither will succeed. 
Confusion is to be escaped not by being repressed into 
stagnation but by being developed into peace. Surely 
it is no weak optimism to believe that such a development 
must come — an age critical but not irreverent, and rev- 
erent without superstition, full of positive belief and of 
tolerant charity, in which yet neither interferes with nor 
deadens the other. 

" There inuv ))<'ili;i|i.s yet dawn an age 
ilure fuitunate, alas ! tliau we. 



168 THE TKESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 

Which without hardness may be sage, 
And gay without frivolity." 

No elements winch you propose to mix combine per- 
fectly at once. You drop your salt into water and it lies 
crude and undissolved at first ; by and by the water takes 
it in and the two are one. Into a world which has been 
governed by authority you throw strong notions of lib- 
erty and personal independence. They lie crudely to- 
gether at first, as they are lying now ; but they must ul- 
timately be assimilated, and a freer judgment as to what 
authority it is right to obey must be united with a more 
loyal obedience to the authority that has been willingly 
acknowledged. That is the future for which we have a 
right to hope. 

The most pathetic sign of such a transition time is in 
the position in which it places the best individuals who 
live in it. The best men in the more fixed and station- 
ary ages speak out the loudest. They stand on certain- 
ties, and speak with clear and confident tones. The 
most noticeable and touching thing about such times as 
ours is the way in which so many of the best men are 
silent and will not speak. It is so both in politics and in 
religion. The most thoughtful men are always tending 
to withdraw from a political confusion which they cannot 
understand, and make themselves mere spectators. And 
how many of the purest and devoutest people whom we 
know refuse to speak a word in all the tumult of religious 
and ecclesiastical debate, that always is so loud around 
us. To take again the words of a very remarkable poem 
of that most representative poet of our time, whom I 
have twice quoted already : — 



THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 169 

" Achilles ponders in his tent, 

The kings of modern thought are dumb, 

Silent they are, though not content, 
And wait to see the future come. 

Silent, while years engrave the brow, * 

Silent, the best are silent now." 

We all feel certainly a disposition of the best and deep- 
est part of us to share this silence, to be still and wait. 
And when the most representative men, the men most in 
the spirit of our time do speak, it is not strange that they 
should be confused and often self-contradictory. It is not 
strange, it is most suggestive and instructive, that hardly 
any thinker should be wholly self-consistent ; that the 
most thoughtful men should say things and then take 
them back, or explain them away; should lay themselves 
open to charges, and then deny that they deserve them, 
and so puzzle both their friends and enemies. It is the 
natural symptom of a time that is not sure how much of 
the past is good, and not sure what there is waiting in the 
future ; a time and men " wandering between two worlds, 
one dead, the other powerless to be born." 

I do not certainly say that such a time is best, though 
really in my heart I do not think the world has ever seen 
a better. There must be better ones to come. The story 
of the world is not told vet. " We are ancients of the 
earth and in the morning of the times." But I have only 
tried to see as clearly as I could what all these symptoms, 
of which our most serious books and our morning news- 
papers alike are full, really mean, and what place this 
bewildering age of ours does probably hold in the long 
series of the ages. The character that I have drawn of 
it in these mere fragmentary suggestions is not the mere 
picture of a theory. It is a character which breaks out 



170 THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 

everywhere. I see it in every book I read, in the action 
of every public man I watch. I hear it in every discus- 
sion of any serious question, and in the lightest talk I 
hold with any of you at your own firesides. It is not 
that my account of it is not true, but only that I have 
failed to state it as I see it, if you have not recognized 
the picture. 

And now the question comes which is most personally 
pressing. How in a time like this can a man live and 
get the best out of it, and at the same time shun its 
worst? Here in this time of uncertainties, here in this 
wandering transition age, we are to live, whether we will 
or no. We did not choose our time. We may wish and 
wish in vain that we had been born centuries ago when, as 
we vainly think, no man doubted, and all men were sat- 
isfied. But here we are, not there. And what can one 
do with his own personal life to keejD it from complete 
confusion, and if it be possible to make it grow strong 
and rich and true, out of these very circumstances which, 
perhaps, we hopelessly deplore ? 

One answer only I can give, and that is very simple. 
In all the uncertainty and change it is the true man's 
place to find what there is that is permanent and certain, 
and to cling to that. In other sorts of times men do not 
distinguish between what is lasting and what is transitory. 
All seems fixed together. Ice and rock alike are solid. 
In times like these, when the ice breaks up, the rocks stand 
out solid and strong among the loosened waves. It is a 
time to find out what is sure and certain and eternal. 

Let me try to tell you in a few words what it seems to 
me are the solid things to which a man may cling. First 
and most prominent, because most superficial, is the soHd- 



THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 171 

ity and persistency of nature, the calmness and oldness 
and orderliness of this world of growth and matter. It 
means something that, in the disorder of thought and 
feeling, so many men are fleeing to the study of orderly 
nature. And it is rest and comfort. Whatever men are 
feeling, the seasons come and go. Whatever men are 
doubting, the rock is firm under their feet, and the stead- 
fast stars pass in their certain courses overhead. Men 
who dare count on nothing else may still count on the 
tree's blossoming and the grape coloring. It is good for 
a man perplexed and lost among many thoughts to come 
into closer intercourse with Nature, and to learn her 
ways and to catch her spirit. It is no fancy to believe 
that if the children of this generation are taught a great 
deal more than we used to be taught of nature, and the 
ways of God in nature, they will be provided with the 
material for far healthier, happier, and less perplexed 
and anxious lives than most of us are living. 

And secondly, it surely is a time when one ought to 
make much of the experiences of life which are perpetual, 
and so which always bring us back to something solid. 
Joy, sorrow, friendship, work, charity, these are eternal. 
They do not change with changing times ; and if a man 
throws himself heartily into the life of his fellow-men and 
takes the pleasures and the pains that come out of the 
touchings of his life with theirs, he is brought into associ- 
ation with these unchanging verities, and his own life be- 
comes less oppressively unruly. Have you never known 
something of this ? Have you not sometimes, when most 
perplexed and bewildered with many thoughts, found 
refuge, strength, health, and peace in mere return from 
solitude to those relations with your brethren for which 



172 THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 

man was made? A joy that comes by human company, 
even a sorrow which has its root in a true human love, 
brings a man back from the solitude which is not good for 
him, and which is haunted with perplexity. It puts him 
again into company with the humanity which has known 
joy and sorrow all through its changing life. Never was 
there a time when a man more needed the help and 
strength of simple, kindly, familiar life among his fel- 
low-men. 

And the next thing which is permanent, and Which a 
man ought to cling to with special closeness now, is duty. 
How old it is, how strong and sure ! How strong it 
makes us when we think that this same simple, single 
instinct of right and wrong, which makes us do our act 
to-day, is precisely the same instinct that made men hon- 
est and kept them pure befora the Flood. So many of 
the perplexities of our time are on the surface. They do 
not reach down to where the conscience lies calm and 
serene below. And when " this unchartered freedom 
tires," when we "feel the weight of chance desires," it 
is good to supplicate for the control of duty, and find a 
" repose that ever is the same." When a man, lost and 
confused, comes to you saying, " How can one live in such 
a time as this? What shall I do?" Answer him first of 
all simply and strongly, " Do right ! Do your duty ! " 
and you have given him at least one sure thing among 
all that is unsure. 

But then, above all things, there is the strength and 
permanence of religion. Never was there such a time for 
a man to cling to that. " Ah, but," you say, " that is 
the most uncertain of all things ! What is more unset- 
tled than religion ? " But no, my friends. There may 



THE PRESENT AND FUTURE FAITH. 173 

be many thoughts about religion that are not clear, but 
religion itself, nay, Christianity itself, is sure, and now is 
just the time for souls to come to a more certain hold 
upon, as they come to a simpler conception of its truth. 
The knowledge that love is at the root of everything; 
the answer of the human soul to the appealing nature 
and life of Jesus Christ ; the value of the soul above the 
body, of the character above the circumstances ; and the 
eternal life, these are what men may cling to. If any 
man does cling to these, he is really upon a rock, and 
whatever else which he thought was rock may prove to 
be ice and melt away, here he is safe. Here is the great, 
last certainty. Be sure of God. With simple, loving wor- 
ship, by continual obedience, by purifying yourself even 
as He is pure, creep close, keep close to Him. Be sure 
of God and nothing can overthrow or drown you. 

And so let us give thanks to God upon Thanksgiving 
Day. Nature is beautiful, and fellow-men are dear, and 
duty is close beside us, and He is over us and in us. 
What more do we want, except to be more thankful and 
more faithful, less complaining of our trials and our time, 
and more worthy of the tasks and privileges He lias given 
us. We want to trust Him with a fuller trust, and so at 
last to come to that high life where we shall " Be careful 
for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplica- 
tion, with thanksgiving, let our request be made known 
unto God,'' for that and that alone is peace. 



X. 

UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 

" And to keep himself unspotted from the world." — James i. 27. 

Men and women grow older in this world of ours, and 
as the years advance they change. Of all the changes 
that they undergo those of their moral natures are the 
most painful to watch. The boy changes into the man, . 
and there is something lost which never seems to come 
back again. It is like the first glow of the morning that 
passes away — like the bloom on the blossom that never 
is restored. Your grown up boy is wise in bad things 
which he used to know nothing about. He has a hard 
conscience now, instead of the soft and tender one he 
used to carry. He is scornful about sacred things, instead 
of devout as he was once. He is no longer gentle, but 
cruel ; no longer earnest, but flippant ; no longer enthusi- 
astic, but cynical. He tolerates evils that he used to hate. 
He makes excuses for passions that he once thought were 
horrible. He qualifies and limits the absolute standards 
of truthfulness and purity. He has changed. His life 
no longer sounds with a perfectly clear ring, or shines 
with a perfectly white lustre. He is no longer unspotted. 

And then when a grown man sees and knows all this 
either in himself or in another, he is sure also that the 
change has come somehow from this boy having grown 
up to manhood in the midst of his fellow-men. We all 



UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 175 

have a dim kind of belief that if we could have taken 
that life and isolated it, it would not have grown so bad. 
We could have kept its freshness and its purity in it if 
we could have kept it to itself. We grant that there 
is evil in the heart, but we do not believe that the mere 
fermentation of that evil in itself could have come to all 
this. The manhood has had to grow here in this great 
universal mass of things, this total of many various in- 
fluences which we call " the world." Home, school, busi- 
ness, society, politics, human life in general in all its 
various activities, — out of this have come the evil forces 
that have changed and soiled this life. It has not been 
himself. He has walked through mire, and the filth has 
gathered on his skirts. He has walked through pesti- 
lence, and the poison has crept into his blood. We all 
think of ourselves, and in our kinder moments think of 
our brethren, as victims. We have not cast away the 
jewel, but we have fallen among thieves, and it has been 
taken from us. Not merely the evil heart within us has 
shown its wickedness, but the evil that is around us has 
fastened to us. We have not merely been spotted, but 
" spotted by the world." 

There is something very sublime, I think, in the Bible 
conception of " The World " which we are always meet- 
ing. It seems to bear witness to the Bible's truth when 
we are able to gather from it such a complete conception 
of this mass of things which we know in fragments, and 
of whose unity we are forever catching half-glimpses. 
The Bible touches us because it seems to know all about 
this " World," — this total of created things, tliis cosmos, 
this aggregate of disorder witli purposes of order mani- 
fest all through it, this sea of tempest with its tides of 



176 UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 

law, this mixture of insignificant trifles with the most 
appalling solemnities, this storehouse of life and activity 
and influence which we are crowding on and crowded by 
every day, out of which come the shaping forces of our 
life, which we call the world. The Bible knows all about 
it, and so we listen when the Bible speaks. 

Here then we have our fact. Our own experience dis- 
covers it. The Bible steps in and describes it. " Lives 
spotted by the world." The stained lives. Where is the 
man or woman who does not know what it means ? There 
is the most outward sort of stain — the stain upon the 
reputation. It is what men see as they pass us, and know 
us by it for one who has struggled and been worsted. 
What man has come to middle life, and kept so pure 
a name that men look at it for refreshment and cour- 
age as they pass ? When we remember what a source of 
strength the purest reputations in the world have always 
been, what a stimulus and help, then we get some idea 
of what the world loses in the fact that almost every rep- 
utation becomes so blurred and spotted that it is wholly 
unlit to be used as a light or a pattern before the man 
is old enough to give it any positive character or force. 
Then there are the stains upon our conduct, the impure 
and untrue acts which cross and cloud the fair surface of 
all our best activity. And then, far worst of all, there 
is the stain upon the heart, of which nobody but the man 
himself knows anything, but which to him gives all their 
unhappiness to the other stains, the debased motives, the 
low desires, the wicked passions of the inner life. These 
are the stains which we accumulate. We set out for the 
battle in the morning strong and clean. By and by we 
catch a moment in the lull of the struggle to look down 



UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD, 177 

upon ourselves, and how tired and how covered with 
dust and blood we are. How long back our first purity 
seems — how long the day seems sometimes — how long 
since we began to live. You know what stains are on 
your lives. Each of us knows, every man and woman, 
as we are here this morning. They burn to our eyes 
even if no neighbor sees them. They burn in the still 
air of the Sabbath even if we do not see them in the 
week. You would not think for the world that your chil- 
dren should grow up to the same stains that have fast- 
ened upon you. You dream for them of a " life un- 
spotted from the world," and the very anxiety of that 
dream proves how you know that your own life is spotted 
and stained. 

And that dream for the children is almost hopeless. 
At any rate the danger is that you will give it u}) by and 
by, and get to expecting and excusing the stains that 
will come upon them as they grow older. The worst 
thing about all this staining power of the world is the 
way in which we come to think of it as inevitable. We 
practically believe that no man can keep himself unspot- 
ted. He must accumulate his stains. Hear how much 
there is of this low, despairing tone on every side of us. 
You talk about the corruption of political life that seems 
to have infected the safest characters, and the answer is, 
" Oh, there is nothing strange about it. No man can go 
through that trial and not fall. No man can live years 
in Washington, and be wholly pure." You talk with a 
great many business men about some point of doubtful 
conventional morality, and they look at you in your pro- 
fessional seclusion, with something that is more than half 
pity. " That is all very well for you," they say, '' but 



178 UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 

that will not do upon the street. I should like to see 
you try to apply that standard to the work I have to do 
to make m}^ bread." And just so when you talk about 
earnestness to the mere creature of society. " It is a 
mere dream," the answer is, " to think that social life 
can be elevated and made noble. Whoever goes there 
must expect the spots upon the robe ; and so, if he is 
wise, will go with robes that will show spots as little as 
possible, — robes as near the world's color as he is able 
to procure." It is not true. Men do go through polit- 
ical life as pure and poor as any most retired mechanic 
lives and works at his bench. And there are merchants 
who do carry, through all the temptations of business 
life, the same high standards, — hands just as clean, and 
hearts just as tender, as they have when they pray to 
God or teach their little children. And social life is 
lighted up with the lustre of the white, unstained robes 
of many a pure man or woman who walks through its 
very midst. But the spots fall so thick that it is easy for 
men to say, " No one can go there and escape them. It 
is hopeless to try to keep yourself unspotted from the 
world ; " and then (for that comes instantly), " We are 
not to blame for the world's spots upon us." 

I said this was the worst, but there is one worse thing 
still. When a man comes not merely to tolerate, but to 
boast of the stains that the world has flung upon him ; 
when he wears his spots as if they were jewels ; wlien he 
flaunts his unscrupulousness and his cynicism and his 
disbelief and his hard-heartedness in your face as the 
signs and badges of his superiority ; when to be innocent 
and unsuspicious and sensitive seems to be ridiculous and 
weak ; when it is reputable to show that we are men of 



UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 179 

the world by exhibiting the stains that the world has left 
upon our reputation, our conduct, and our heart, then we 
understand how flagrant is the danger ; then we see how 
hard it must be to keep ourselves unspotted from the 
world. The world's stains do become matters of pride 
and choice. We compare ourselves with one another. 
We decide what stains shall be most honorable. We give 
conventional ranks and values to the signs of our own 
disgrace. It is more respectable to have learnt heart- 
lessness from the world than to have learnt dishonesty ; 
more honorable to have become miserly than to have be- 
come licentious. As the Jews used to establish a rank 
and precedence between the commandments which God 
had given them, so we decide which of the laws of the 
world, our master, it is good to keep, and which others it 
is good to break. 

And now, in view of all this, we come to our religion. 
We hear St. James, as true to-day as when he wrote to 
those first Christians. In his unsparing words he tells us 
what Christianity has to say to all this state of things. 
"• Pure Religion and undefiled before God and the Father 
is this. To visit the fatherless and widows in their afflic- 
tion, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." See 
how intolerant Religion is. She starts with what men 
have declared to be impossible. She refuses to bring down 
her standards. She insists that men must come up to her. 
No man is thoroughly religious, she declares, unless he 
does this, which it seems so hard to do, unless he goes 
through this world untainted, as the sunbeam goes through 
the mist. Religion refuses to be degraded into a mere 
means for fulfilling the purposes of man's selfishness. 
She proclaims absolute standards, and will not lower 



180 UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 

them. She will not say to any man, weak and com- 
promising with the world, " Well, your case is a hard 
one, and for you I waive a part of my demands. For you 
religion shall mean not to do this sin or that sin. These 
other sins, in consideration of your feebleness and temp- 
tations, I give you leave to do." Before eveiy man, in 
the very thickest of the world's contagions, she stands and 
says with her unwavering voice, " Come out. Be sepa- 
rate. Keep yourself unspotted from the world." 

There is something sublime in this unsparingness. It 
almost proves that our religion is divine, when it under- 
takes for man so divine a task. It could not sustain itself 
in its great claim to be from God unless it took this high 
and godlike ground, that whoever named the name of 
Christ must depart from all iniquity. My dear friends, 
our religion is not true unless it have this power in it. 
Unless the statesman taking it to Congress, the mer- 
chant taking it into business, the man or woman carry- 
ing it with them where they go in all their ordinary 
occupations and amusements, do indeed find it the power 
of purity and strength. We must bring our faith to this 
test. Unless our Christianity does this for us, it is not 
the true religion that St. James talked of, and that the 
Lord Jesus came to reveal and to bestow. 

Let us be sure of this. We go for our assurance to the 
first assertion of the real character of Christianity in the 
life of Jesus. It is terrible to see with how much qualifica- 
tion and misconception the plain first fact of Christianity 
has been weakened and covered up — the clear first fact 
that the life of Jesus Christ was meant to be the pattern 
of the lives of all of those who called themselves His fol- 
lowers. Even our devout reverence of His divinity has 



UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 181 

often been allo^A'ed to hide the certainty that that life of 
the Gospels was a real human life, capable of being pat- 
tern and inspiration to these human lives of ours. The 
very sinlessness of Jesus has made Him seem to many not 
to be man, instead of standing as it was meant to stand, 
the type of what all manhood had been made at first, and 
of what all men must come to be. But the very principle 
of the Incarnation, that without which it loses all its 
value, surely is this, that Christ was Himself the first 
Christian ; that in Him was first displayed the power of 
that grace by which all who believed in Him w^ere after- 
wards to be helped and saved. And so the life of Jesus 
was lived in the closest contact with His fellow-men. 
The strange temptation in the desert was only the typal 
scene of all His life. He was always " seeing the king- 
doms of the world, and all the glory of them," so realiz- 
ing the highest temptations to which our nature is open ; 
always " feeling an hungered," so entering into the lowest 
enticements that tell upon our human flesh. If He had 
soared like an angel over this troubled city of humanity, 
up above its smoke and dust, and then had stood with 
white garments on the hills beyond. His purity would 
have been only a mockery, and His Incarnation would 
not have been spiritually real ; but if He walked through 
the same muddy streets of sordid care and penetrated the 
same murky atmosphere of passion that we have to go 
through, and thence came out pure and unspotted from 
the world, then He is really God manifest in the flesh. 
You say His victory was too easy to be a type of ours. 
But how do you know ? Can you read the story of the 
temptation, and give any reality to it, without feeling 
that there may have been there a struggle as faf beyond 



182 UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD, 

any of ours in its intensity as the triumph outwent any of 
ours in its perfectness. But make it as divinely easy as 
you will, still that very ease is set before us as the thing 
we are to attain to, without which we are not to be sat- 
isfied. Christ is tolerant of any feebleness and slowness, 
but not of any abandonment of the desire and design. 
No prospect short of this must bound our view. As He 
came forth spotless, so by His power we must come out 
unstained at last, and " walk with Him in white." 

Filling ourselves with this idea, then, that the spotless- 
ness of the Saviour's life is the pattern of the spotless 
life to which we must aspire, — if we begin to study it, 
I think the first thing that strikes us about it is its posi- 
tiveness. I feel, at once, as I read the story of Jesus, that 
he was not continually on the defensive. He was not 
.continually standing guard over his own purity, and de- 
fending it from attack. There are two ways of defending 
a castle : one by shutting yourself up in it, and guard- 
ing every loophole ; the other by making it an open cen- 
tre of operations from which all the surrounding country 
may be subdued. Is not the last the truest safety ? 
Jesus was never guarding himself, but always invading 
the lives of others with His holiness. There never was 
such an open life as His, and yet the force with which 
His character and love flowed out upon the world, kept 
back, more strongly than any granite wall of prudent 
caution could have done, the world from pressing in on 
Him. His life was like an open stream that keeps the 
sea from flowing up into it by the eager force with which 
it flows down into the sea. He was so anxious that the 
world should be saved that therein was His salvation 
from the world. He labored so to make the world pure 



UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 183 

that He never even had to try to be pure Himself. 
Health issued from Him so to the sick who touched His 
garments that He was in no danger of their infection 
coming in to Him. This was the positiveness of His sin- 
lessness. He did not spend His Ufe in trying not to do 
wrong. He was too full of the earnest love and longing 
to do right, — to do His Father's will. 

And so we see, by contrast, how many of our attempts 
at purity fail by their negativeness. A man knows that 
drink is ruining him, soul and body, and he makes up 
his mind that he will not drink again. How soon the 
empty hour grows wearisome, and his feet, having no 
other direction given to them, and tired of mere standing 
still, have carried him back to the old corner, and he is 
at the bar with the full glass in his hand again. I do 
think that we break almost all our resolutions not to do 
wrong, while we keep a large proportion of our resolu- 
tions that we will do what is right. Habit, which is the 
power by which evil rules us, is only strong in a vacant 
life. It is the empty, swept, and gai'nished house to 
which the devils come back to hold still higher revel. 
And even if we could resist the evil by merely hold- 
ing out against it, still should we not be like castles 
protecting themselves, but conquering and enriching no 
country around their walls ? Some people seem to be 
here in the world just on their guard all the while, al- 
ways so afraid of doing wrong that they never do any- 
thing really right. They do not add to the world's moral 
force; as the man, who, by constant watchfulness over his 
own health, just keeps himself from dying, contributes 
nothing to the world's vitality. All merely negative 
purity has something of the taint of the impurity that 



184 UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 

it resists. The effort not to be frivolous is frivolous it- 
self. The effort not to be selfish is very apt to be only 
another form of selfishness. 

This seems to me to be really what has often been 
meant when people have drawn strong contrasts between 
morality and religion. Morality is apt to be conceived 
as negative. Religion is, by its very nature, positive. 
Morality is to religion what the Old Testament is to the 
New, what the Law is to the Gospel. And so religion 
is higher than morality, as manly virtue is nobler than 
child-like innocence. It is a delusion and a weakness 
for you, O man of forty, to be w^ishing back again your 
boyhood, before the world had stained and spotted you. 
Manhood is better than boyhood, and the true old age 
than the truest youth. Of course the building was strong 
and beautiful before the fire on Saturday morning ; but to 
have stood through the fire, and to give up its treasures, 
unhurt, out of the safe, on Monday morning, after the 
fire, that was the real beauty and strength. So we are 
sure at once, and we learn it certainly from Christ, that 
the true spotlessness from the world must come, not neg- 
atively, by the garments being drawn back from every 
worldly contact, but positively, by the garments being 
so essentially, divinely pure that they fling pohution off, 
as sunshine, hurrying on its mission to the world, flings 
back the darkness that tries to stop its way. 

And wliat then ? Is any such purity as Christ's, so 
positive, so strong, possible for us ? As I said a few 
moments ago, if our religion cannot help us to it, then 
our religion fails of its task. Now let me try to show 
you what the faith of Christ can do for us, if we will 
let it, to make us so strong that the contaminations of 



UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 185 

the world cannot affect us. I am sure that there are 
some of us who have come here, conscious of stains and 
wounds from the hard conflicts of the week, who do 
indeed desire to know how they can be stronger and 
purer. 

In the first place, Christianity is a religion of the su- 
pernatural, and, to any one who is thoroughly in its 
power, it must bring the presence of a live supernatu- 
ralism, and make that the atmosphere of his life. You A 
cannot bring Christ's religion down, and make it a thing 
of this world. That first truth of the Incarnation is the 
controlling truth of the Christian faith. Behind, before 
all knowledge of why Chiist came into this world, what 
He came to do, there must always be the fact that He 
did come, that the wall between the two worlds was 
broken, the gulf between God and man was bridged, 
and that to the soul of every mortal who saw Christ 
the spiritual world, with all its higher standards and 
impulses, became visible and powerful. Other religions 
vou may bring down to mere codes of worldly wisdom. 
Christianity is supernatural, or it is nothing. The Incar- 
nation is its essential heart, by which it lives and moves 
and has its being. And what then? What the poor 
creature needs who is standing right in the midst of the 
world's defilements, catching them on every side, is it not 
just this : the clear, sure certainty of another world, of 
a spiritual world with spiritual purity for its law? It is 
very much as if you went out of the pure, sweet, sensi- 
tive home-life in which you have been bred, into the 
lowest, grossest, filthiest pollution of the city. Suppose 
you had to live there a week, a month. What would 
keep you pure from its defilement? Would it not be 



186 UNSPOTTED "FROM THE WORLD. 

the constant sense, the ever-present vision of that higher 
reahii of life that you had come from, making your pres- 
ent home seem dreadful to you ? Would not the very 
knowledge that such a higher realm of life existed be 
your strength and protection ? Nay, to alter the illus- 
tration a little, would not your presence, if you were 
really radiant with the purity of the better life you came 
from, exalt and help some poor creature there with the 
knowledge of the existence and the possibility of better 
things? And that is just the power of the Incarnation. 
It opened the spiritual, the supernatural, the eternal. It 
was as if the clouds were broken above this human val- 
ley that we live in, and men saw the Alps above them, 
and took courage. For, remember, it was a true Incar- 
nation. It was a real bringing of God in the flesh. It 
was a real assertion of the possible union of humanity 
and divinity ; and by all its tender and familiar inci- 
dents, by the babyhood and home life, the hungerings 
and thirstings of the incarnate Christ, it brought the di- 
vinity that it intended to reveal close into the hearts and 
houses of mankind. It made the supernatural possible 
as a motive in the smallest acts of men. I do not be- 
lieve that there could be a God in heaven and men not 
know it by some movement of their hearts, and fear 
Him in their more solemn actions, in their governing of 
the nations, and their thinking about life and death ; 
but what the Incarnation did was to bring God so near 
that no slightest action could hide away from Him ; that 
every least activity of life should feel His presence, 
and men should not only lead their armies and make 
their laws, but rise up and go to sleep, walk in the 
street, play with their children, work in their shops, 



UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 187 

talk with their neighbors, all in the fear and love of 
the Lord. 

Make, then, this Incarnation the one pervading power 
of a man's life. Let his first feeling about this world al- 
ways be, " God has been here, and so God is here still," 
and have you not made him strong to walk unpolluted 
and unscorched through the furnace of the world's most 
fiery corruptions ? It is the low system, the constitution 
that is broken down and depressed in tone, that takes the 
contagion. The strong, really well man, walks by the 
house where disease is rioting, and his healthy vitality 
flings the distemper back. And a deep, living sense of 
God is the true vitality of a human soul which quenches 
the poisonous fires of corruption, as powerless to be hurt 
by it as the cold, calm sea is to be set on fire by the coals 
that you may cast burning into its bosom. Think of the 
day after Jesus had called John and Peter and Nathanael 
to be his servants. They had begun to hear his words 
of eternal life. They had become dimly conscious of so 
much above and beyond. Do you think it was as hard 
for them to pass unspotted by the places of temptation in 
Cliorazin and Capernaum ? They had tasted the powers 
of tlie world to come. And the true way, the only true 
way, to make any man who is a slave to this world, catch- 
ing its corruption, free and pure, is to make him see an- 
other world, the supernatural world, the world of spirit- 
ual life above him and below him and stretehino; out 
before him into eternity, made visible by Christ's Incar- 
nation. 

2. But tins is not enough. No mere sense of the 
supernatural ever saved a soul. Christ must come nearer 
to the soul than this before it can really by Him " escape 



188 UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 

the corruption that is in the world." Then there comes 
in all the personal relation between the soul and its 
Saviour. Now we must mount to think what was the 
purpose of the Incarnation. We must get sight of that 
divine pity which saw us in our sins and came to rescue 
us. We must understand how clear-sighted the Creator 
is to see and feel the need of every one among his creat- 
ures. We must grasp the bewildering thought of a per- 
sonal love for our single souls. And then all must be 
emphasized and condensed into the world's tragedy. We 
must find the meaning, so unintelligible to multitudes, so 
precious to every soul that really has laid hold of it, in 
those strange words, " The Lord Jesus Christ died for 
me." We must see the Jesus of the cross on the cross. 
And what then ? Do you not see ? Full of profoundest 
gratitude the soul looks round to see what it can give to 
the Saviour in token of its feeling of his love. And it 
can find nothing. It has nothing to give. And hopeless 
of finding anything, it simply gives itself. It is its own 
no longer. It is given away to Christ. It lives His life 
and not its own. Can you imagine that becoming real to 
a man and not changing his relation to the temptations 
that beset him. He feels now with Christ's feeling, and 
corruption drops away from him as it drops away from 
Christ. Shame, love, hope, every good passion wakes in 
the soul. It walks unharmed, because it walks in this 
new sense of consecration. That seems to me to be the 
perfect ransom of a soul. When I am so thankful to 
Christ for all He suffered in my behalf that I give up 
my life to Him to show Him how I love Him, and by my 
dedication of myself to Him am saved from the world's 
low slaveries and stains, — then, it seems to me, my 



UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 189 

heaven is begun, its security and peace I have already- 
entered. I am already safe within its sheltering walls, 
and all my happy, restful life takes up already its eter- 
nal psalm. Already I have "washed my robes and made 
them white in the blood of the Lamb." 

These are the profound ways in which men's souls are 
kept unspotted from the world by Christ. Do you not 
see how far they go beyond the feeble, fitful resolutions 
to resist and to reform with which we are always cheat- 
ing our eager souls? But there is one more principle 
which seems to me so important and so true that I must 
take your time to tell you of it. When I ask somewhat 
more minutely into the method which Christ uses to 
keep his servants free from the world's corruption, I seem 
to come to something like this, which seems, like so much 
besides in the Gospel, at first surprising, and then sub- 
limely natural and reasonable, that it is by a Christ-like 
dedication to the world that Christ really saves us from 
the world. Do you see what I mean ? You go to your 
Lord, and say, " O Lord, this world is tempting me, 
and I fear its stains. How shall I escape it ? Shall 1 
run away from it ? " And the answer comes, as unmis- 
takable as if a voice spoke out of the opened sky, " No ; 
go up close to this world, and help it ; feel for its wick- 
edness ; pity it ; sacrifice yourself for it ; so shall you be 
safest from its infection ; so shall you be surest not to 
sacrifice yourself to it." They say the doctors and the 
nurses are least likely to catch the epidemic. If you 
have a friend who is dishonest or impure, the surest way 
to save yourself from him is to try to save him. More 
pure and more secure in purity than the Pharisee, man 
or woman, who draws back the spotless skirts from the 



190 UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 

reach of the poor fallen creature who clutches at them, 
is the pitying man or woman who in the nearest broth- 
erhood or sisterhood goes close to the wretched sinner 
and takes him by the hand to lift him. I am not sur- 
prised to hear that the man who despises the sinner and 
gets as far away from him as possible has become, after 
all, the sharer of his sin. I am surprised if the tender 
sympathizer who goes to the poor slave of sin, and says, 
" My brother, my heart bleeds for you ; let me help 
you," — I am surprised if he is not armed by his pity 
against the contagion of the sin he tries to help, and if 
he does not save both his brother and himself together. 

Is not this one of the most beautiful principles in all 
the realm of truth ? I open the book of the dear and 
holy life again, and there I see its illustration. What 
was it that saved Jesus from the infection of tlie world ? 
Was it not the same divinity which made him the Saviour 
of the world ? Was He ever so strongly and purely pure 
as when he stood there in the temple and looked down 
upon the wretched woman at His feet, and said, " Neither 
do I condemn thee ? " Was He ever so perfectly true to 
His Father as when He sat and sorrowed over apostate 
Jerusalem ? It is the ineffable union of Christ with the 
sinner that most bears witness to Christ's sinlessness ; 
and is there not something in your own experience which 
testifies that the Saviour never seemed so perfectly above 
you in the assurance of His holiness as when He was 
the nearest to your side in loving pity for your sin, — 
never so perfectly sinless as when He was " made sin " 
for you ? 

I am sure that as we grow better and better Christians 
this will become more and more the source and fountain 



UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 191 

of our strength. We shall come so close up to all the 
world's wickedness that it cannot strike us. We shall 
be saved from it by our pity for it. We shall be far 
from its contagion the closer that we come to its needs. 
We shall be as pure as the angels the more completely 
we give ourselves up to the ministering angels' work. 
This is the true positiveness of the Christian's purity, the 
real safety of the loving and laboring life. 

These, then, are the powers for our preservation. I 
cannot recount them without feeling anew how deep they 
go. Is it then true that none of us can keep himself un- 
spotted from the world unless his life be full of reverence 
for God and trust in Christ and tender pity for his fel- 
low-men ? Wliat is that but to say, that "• Except a man 
be born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of 
God?" Oh, what poor makeshifts all our laws and de- 
cencies and proprieties appear beside the live power of 
the new manhood of grace. Oh, how hard and hopeless 
seems the prudent, watchful, timid man, who is trying 
to save himself by constant self-denials, beside the new 
freeman of the Lord Jesus Christ, full of the high am- 
bitions and sure hopes of the heavenly life. 

Some of the world's dangers change from age to age. 
Our own time has its own forms of danger, and it is free 
from some that once beset our fathers. But so long as 
the world is still the world, the great mass of its corrupt 
influence is still the same. Lust, falsehood, cruelty, in- 
justice, selfishness, these are about us as they were about 
Noah and Abraham and Moses. But it is possible to be 
so given up to Christ and to fellow-man that they shall 
not hurt us. It is possible for us to walk through the 
liic and not be burned; but it depends always and wholly 



192 UNSPOTTED FROM THE WORLD. 

upon whether He walks there with us. Let us not trust 
ourselves, for we are weakness. Let us trust Him, and 
work for all who need us, for so shall we go pure through 
all impurity, and come at last home, where the children 
shall be safe forever in the Father's house, the sheep 
gathered forever into the Shepherd's fold. 



XI. 

A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 

" Then were there two thieves crucified with Him. — Matt, xxvii. 38. 
" I am crucified with Christ."— Gal. ii. 20. 

Whoever reads tlie story of our Lord's crucifixion as 
we have read it here this morning feels that a part of its 
humiliation was that He did not suffer alone. Crucifix- 
ion was terrible and disgraceful enough in itself, but if 
Jesus had hung upon His cross with nothing near him to 
disturb the impression of His calm serenity and inno- 
cence, it might well have happened that the people who 
stood and watched would have lost sight of the disgrace, 
and would have felt the majesty of the sacrifice. Already 
that place of' suffering might have seemed as glorious as 
it has seemed to the world since. An awe and wonder, 
almost ready to break out in thankfulness and praise, 
might have spread through the multitude who watched 
the spectacle of heroism and love. But, as it was, they 
went to the prison and dragged out two wretched culprits 
who were waiting for their doom. That there might be 
no doubt about the disgracefulness of the Saviour's suffer- 
ings, they hung Him between two thieves. One on the 
right hand and the other on the left, those malefactors 
advertised the ignominy of His pain. Their friends, the 
thieves and rouglis of Jerusalem, were side by side with 
His disciples in the crowd. The loathing of all honest 

13 



194 A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 

men was heaped upon them, and He, hanging there with 
them, in the same condemnation, was covered with the 
mantle of their sin. He had come into their lot. He 
bore their curse. He took His share in their disgrace 
when He was crucified with them. 

It was not many years afterward that the great St. 
Paul, whose life had become wonderful to himself as he 
saw under what new motives and to what new purpose it 
was lived since he became a disciple of Jesus, when he 
tried to sum up that life and tell the beauty of its associ- 
ation with his Lord, used this strange language: "I am 
crucified with Christ." His life was full of suffering, and 
suffering which had to do with sin. He found himself 
every day "dying to the world," that is, separated by 
self-sacrifice and pain from the wicked things about 
him. In all that suffering, which was at once the token 
and the means of higher life, he felt himself drawn to- 
wards and taken into the experience of his Master. As 
he was suffering, so Jesus had suffered. As he by his 
suffering was able at once to bear his testiiiiony against, 
to separate himself from, and also to help the sinful 
world, so Jesus had declared, upon His cross, at once 
His holiness and His pity. Paul saw in his ministry of 
self-sacrifice a dim, imperfect, far-off echo of his Lord's, 
and so he told the story of his new life in the terms of 
the story of that life into which it had entered, and he 
said, " I am crucified with Christ." 

I have brought these two passages together, because, 
in their union, they bring out the complete truth on 
which we wish to dwell upon Good-Friday. The cross 
before which we stand to-day has both its humiliation 
and its glory. It is a tragedy that bewilders and dis- 



A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 195 

mays us. It is likewise a proclamation of peace and 
hope. In the degradation of Christ, which compelled 
Him to be crucified with the thieves, there is a picture 
of how very low He stooped to our condition. In the 
triumph of Paul, at his participation with Christ, we 
see how the believer is taken into his Master's privilege. 
The two belong together. Christ was humiliated into 
our condition that we might be exalted unto His. Christ 
was crucified with man that man might rejoice in being 
crucified with Christ. Both the depth to which He went 
to seek man and the height up to which He would carry 
man, were set forth in the cross. Alas for him who, 
standing on Good-Friday and looking at the crucifixion, 
does not see both of these, does not learn at once how 
low his Saviour went to find him, and how high he may 
go if he will make his Saviour's life his own ! Let us 
look at both the scenes. Let us try to understand both 
thoughts, — Christ's crucifixion with man, and man's cru- 
cifixion with Christ, — and bind them both together in 
one humbling and inspiring truth. 

Turn, then, first, to the cross upon Calvary, and let us 
think about Christ's crucifixion with man. In the prison 
at Jerusalem there are two robbers lying, waiting for 
their death. It is sure to come. Their crimes have 
doomed them to it. As they look back over their 
miserable lives they can see how from their boyhood, 
when their vice began, they have been steadily and cer- 
tainly moving on towards this destiny. Their sin has 
deepened, and, with their deepening sin, the darkness of 
the coming death has gathered round them. They have 
known whither they were going. They have known that 
some time or other a life like theirs must bring a violent 



196 A GOOD-FKIDAY SEEMON. 

death. There is no record of their names, or anvthinsr 
about them. We do not separate or individualize them. 
To us, as they sit there in prison, they are simply wicked 
men waiting for the death which their wickedness lias 
brought upon them. And now, at last, the time has 
come. The last morning dawns upon them. Sin is fin- 
ished, and, on this solemn Good- Friday, it brings forth 
death. The soldiers are at the door, and the crosses are 
waiting. You see how general, how typical, how little 
personal it all is. It is not these two men come to the 
ruin which their special sin deserves. It is wickedness, 
which, by the terrible necessity of its nature, has brought 
forth death. And now witli the black record of this 
wickedness in your minds, think of another life which 
comes to its crisis on this same Good-Friday. There 
has been a man living in Palestine liere for thirty years, 
and He has never done a sin. Nay, more than that, He 
has amazed the eyes of men with a positive holiness, 
a picture of what it is to be absolutely good, such as they 
never dreamed of. This spotless, strong, pure goodness 
has all been poured out in love. The life has been all 
self-sacrifice. He lias never seemed to think of Him- 
self. Health and truth have gone out from Him to who- 
ever touched Him. A life like the shining of the sun ! 
A life of which, as men looked at it, they have felt that 
in it their best dreams of humanity were surpassed, — 
that in it there was something more than human. Last 
night Jesus of Nazareth had sat with his disciples, and 
talked with them in words of spiritual wisdom which 
have ever since been the wonder of the world. They had 
gone out then, together, to the Garden of Gethsemane. 
There Jesus had plead with God, in agony, while His dis- 



A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 197 

ciples slept with weariness and sorrow. By and by the 
soldiers came and took Jesus, and carried Him away to 
the High Priest. After that He was wholly separated 
from His friends, — from eveiybody that believed in Him 
and loved Him. From the High Priest's house, where 
He is insulted and taunted. He is sent early on this Fri- 
day morning to the Governor's. There He is confronted 
with the cold, brutal unbelief of the Roman magistrate. 
He is sent to Herod, and back again to Pilate, walking 
the familiar streets in disgrace and desertion. Then He 
is scourged. Then the people demand His blood. At 
last the Governor yields to them, and, with the sentence 
of a criminal. He is 'led away, and his procession meets 
the procession in which the two thieves are led to death, 
and they are crucified together. 

There, then, are the two stories. See how far apart 
they begin. One in the innocence of perfect holiness ; 
the other in the blackest wickedness. And then see how 
they meet at last. As when a black and turbid stream 
goes hurrying towards a cavern's gloom, into which it is 
destined to plunge itself out of sight, and just before it 
reaches its dark doom, a pure, fresh river that was born 
among the snows in the sunlight on the mountain's top, 
and has sung its way down through flowers, drops its 
quiet, transparent waters into the tumultuous current, 
and shares its plunge, — so the pure holiness of Christ 
fell into the stream of human wickedness, and shared its 
fate. The Saviour's life entered into the life of human- 
ity at its blackest. He had left behind heaven ; He had 
left behind even the little heavenliness which he had 
found upon the earth. All the disciples had forsaken 
Him, and fled. The little flicker of sympatliy which He 



198 A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 

had seen upon the face of Pilate, He had lost now. He 
had come to the company of robbers. There were two 
thieves crucified with Him. 

That is the sio-ht Avhich we behold as we look at these 
three crosses standing out sharp and terrible against the 
sky. Into the darkest of earth's darkness, into the deep- 
est consequences of sin where it was possible for in- 
nocence to go, the Incarnate One has gone. Our Im- 
manuel, our God with us, is with the worst of us in 
his most awful misery. No child of God shall know 
any suffering which this love shall not fathom to its 
depths with Him. No pain, except the purely per- 
sonal pain of remorse, which it is eternally impossible 
that innocence should feel, no pain but that, shall there 
be anywhere upon the earth, of which any agonized soul 
shall be able to cry out to his Saviour and say, " Do not 
mock me with your pity. You do not know what my 
pain is." And even something as like remorse as is that 
profound contrition which comes to a brother when his 
brother sins, or to a father when a child is lost, even 
the woe which comes of such identification with the sin- 
ner as leaves out nothing save his sin, share, even that 
last pain of life, which only they who have something 
divine in them can feel, even that the Divine One en- 
dured, and set forth before us in his crucifixion between 
the robbers. 

Once in the hours while he hung there, a cry of desola- 
tion, abandonment, and disgrace, burst from the sufferer's 
lips. " My God I My God ! why hast thou forsaken me ? " 
He cries, making His own the words of an old psalm of 
woe. When I read what men have written to explain 
the meaning of Jesus in that cry, I always feel anew how 



A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 199 

much deeper than our comprehension went his identifi- 
cation with humanity when He plunged into the darkness 
of its sin. " He was made flesh ! " Into what mysteri- 
ous contact with the sinfuhiess to which the flesh of man 
had given itself that being made flesh brought him, I 
know no man has ever fathomed. If I try to fathom it at 
all, I can only picture to myself the most Christlike act, 
the most Messianic entrance into the strange and dread- 
ful fate of other men which my imagination can conceive. 
Let me suppose that the purest woman in this town, the 
most sensitive and scrupulous, moved by a sense of sister- 
hood and by a longing pity, gathers up all her life and 
goes and lives among the lowest and most brutal and 
most foul savages that this earth contains. As she enters 
their land she leaves her own life behind. She accepts 
their life. Everything, except their wickedness, she 
makes her own. She sacrifices her fastidiousness every 
day. She finds herself the victim of habits which are 
the consequences of long years of sin. No sensibility 
that is not shocked, no fine and pure taste that is not 
wounded. Her common human nature with these sav- 
ages asserts itself to her every day. But the very depth 
of the union into which she comes with them by her pity 
makes her all the more sensitive to the horror of their 
life. Their sin is awful to her, not only because of her 
own purity, but because of the keen understanding of its 
awfulness, which comes from her profound oneness of 
nature with these sinners. She cannot stand off and 
look at them and work for them from a safe distance. 
She is one of them in their common humariity. In every 
foul wickedness of theirs she suffers. She bears their 
sins a heavy burden on her heart. Is it strange that she 



200 A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 

comes by and by to feel the wretchedness and woe of that 
island taking complete possession of her ? Is it strange 
•that, — though she knows that the sweet home across the 
sea, which she has left, is just as sweet as ever, and that 
her friends there are loving her, and have not forgotten 
her a moment, — the awful load she carries, the frightful 
atmosphere of vice that reeks around her, should seem 
^sometimes to shut her in to desolation and shut her out 
from every higher life and all pure love, so that when this 
mood is darkest she should stand some day upon the 
beach, and, without any faithlessness to her task, or any 
distrust of the friends at home, cry out across the sea to 
them, "Oh, why have you forsaken me?" Do not imag- 
ine that I think that any hviman sacrifice can truly image 
His surrender, or any human pain declare the measure of 
His woe. But this is surely the best that earth can show 
us of the kind of agony with which the Christ who, in 
His love, had gone down to the deepest and most terrible 
depths of humanity, even to being crucified between two 
thieves, seemed for a moment to have lost himself, and 
cried out to the Father, with whom He was eternally and 
inseparably one, " Oh, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? " If 
the cry bewilders as we try to comprehend the deity to 
which it appeals, it may at least reveal to us something 
of the depth out of which it ascends. 

Such then is the story of Christ's crucifixion in and 
with and for humanity. It is no fantastic conception of 
the imputation to Him of a sinfulness which was not His, 
of God's counting Him guilty of wickedness which He 
had never done. It is something infinitely, awfully more 
real than that. It is that the God who made man in His 
own image, coming to the life of man, found that image 



A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 201 

all bi'oken and lost. He came into men's life and found 
them dying for their sin. He was guiltless of their sin, 
but He entered with consummate intensity of suffering 
into their death, as the pure soul which I pictured in that 
foul savage island must feel the horror of the misery 
which vice has brought there more than its inhabitants, 
just in proportion as it was free from the vice with which 
they are polluted. It was a sin not His own which He 
bore upon the cross. Think, if you can, how an incai'- 
nation in a world wholly free from sin would have closed, 
and the Incarnate One gone up to His eternal glory, and 
then you have some conception of what sin lias done in 
this woi'ld. Can we see God come among a race that does 
not know what sin is, and, having shared its life, at last 
stand ready to withdraw His presence from their sight? 
Think of the scene of gratitude and love. Can we not 
see the joyous thankful company of mortals, as with tri- 
umphant songs of praise they bring their Lord and friend 
up to the noblest height of earth, and with hearts full of 
trust that He could never leave them wholly, see His 
form depart out of their view ? How different it all is 
now ! Instead of this scene, there is the cross on Cal- 
vary ! Instead of God with His noblest creatures among 
the noblest scenes of earth, in sympathy of common holi- 
ness, here is the Son of God beside the vilest of mankind 
upon the cross of shame. Ah, my dear friends, there is 
the terrible consummate testimony of what sin is. We 
trace its power everywhere else. We see its woe. We 
learn to hate it, but w^e come to the profoundest knowl- 
edge and the profoundest hatred of it when we come to 
this, that it crucified the Son of God with wicked men, it 
made Jesus the sharer of our human woe. Sin did this. 



202 A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 

Whose sin ? "What sin ? Then it is that the terrible 
identity of sin comes out. Here in the presence of God's 
suffering and dying Son the oneness of God's family is 
clear. All that we have ever done that has helped to 
make the world a different place from that holy ground 
on which the Holy God might have walked in perfect 
sympathy with His obedient children, all our wilfulness, 
all our disobedience, all our untruth, all our passion, all 
our lust, all our selfishness, all our wickednesses which 
we call little wickednesses at home or in the street, they 
all take their place in, they all declare their oneness with, 
that sin which brought Christ to the cross. It is our 
punishment that He shares. It is our woe down into 
which His love has brought Him. We hang upon our 
cross and He hangs on His beside us. For our cross we 
can blame none but ourselves. Our sin has brought us 
what we suffer, but His cross no sin of His has built. It 
is the wickedness in which we have so deep a part, which 
decrees that it shall be a cross and not a throne. There 
comes, as the result of all, just exactly what is expressed 
in the strange deep words of the penitent thief to his 
mocking comrade, — words which the soul may turn and 
address to itself, invoking from itself a solemn repentance 
and hate of sin as it sees its Saviour a shai'er in the suf- 
fering which its sin brings : " Dost not thou fear God, 
seeing thou art in the same condemnation ? And we in- 
deed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds ; 
but this man hath done nothing amiss." 

But it is time now that we should turn to the other 
aspect of the cross. I have tried to depict the mean- 
ing of Christ crucified with man, the Son of God enter- 
ing into the shame and pain of human sin. Now hear 



A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 203 

St. Paul. A few short years have passed away. The 
crucifixion of Jesus has been ilhiniinated by the resurrec- 
tion, the ascension, and the Pentecost. It has become 
already, in the minds of hundreds of men and women, a 
dear and glorious event. Behind its shame and pain it 
has opened a heart of love and glory, and St. Paul, sum- 
ming up his life in its best privileges and holiest pur- 
poses, says, " I am crucified with Christ." You see how 
great the difference is. Before, when Christ was cruci- 
fied with the two thieves, it was the Son of God brought 
down into the misery and shame of man. Now, when 
Paul is crucified with Jesus, it is a man brought up into 
the glory of the Son of God. Evidently there must be 
another side, a side of privilege and delight, to this great 
tragedy, or else we should not hear a man cry with a 
tone of exultation, such as this, " Lo, I am crucified 
with Christ." And it is something which, strange as it 
would have seemed to any one who stood before the 
cross on Good-Friday, has grown most familiar to the 
Christian since. What does it mean ? Is it not this : 
that as Christ, by his self-sacrifice, entered into the com- 
pany of man, so there is a self-surrender by which man 
enters into the company of Christ. He came down to 
us, and tasted on our cross the misery of sin. We may 
go up to His cross, and taste, with Him, the glory and 
peace of perfect obedience and communion with God. 

For even the dullest, as he stands before the crucifix- 
ion, gets some dim impression that there are two differ- 
ent elements there, — one dreadful, and one beautiful. 
There is what Christ is made for us, the victim, torn and 
tortured and distressed, and there is what Christ is in 
Himself, and what he wants to make us, — the loving. 



204 A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 

peaceful son of God. Christ surrendei-ed Himself and 
became the first. We, if we can surrender ourselves, 
may become the second, and share the glory of His cru- 
cifixion. It is a strange thought to many, but it is a 
thought that grows very dear to the souls that really 
enter into it, that there was something in the crucifixion 
which it is our highest privilege if we can share. Hang- 
ing there in mockery and pain, there was still something 
in the heart of Jesus which made it tlie richest heart in 
all the wox'ld ; something which, if by any crucifixion 
we can gather into our hearts, we shall be rich indeed. 
See what it was. First, the truth of the cross must have 
been divinely and completely present with him. That 
truth was the love of God. All the memory of the past, 
all the way in which, from the beginning of sin, mere}' 
had been making ready to meet the sin, all the develop- 
ment, age after age, of the design of pity, which at last 
had come here to its consummation, — all this must have 
filled the soul of Jesus, and, in the midst of His pain, 
comforted and strengthened Him. It is not for us to 
speak of what the mystery of Incarnation means, but we 
cannot help believing that there came to Christ, then, 
such knowledge of the Godhood in which He belonged 
as could come only to that one point in the moral uni- 
verse where the Eternal Holiness was sufferino- for hu- 
man sin. The truth of the cross, the truth of the love 
of God, inexhaustible and tireless, was with Him in His 
sufferings. 

And beside the truth of the cross there must have 
been the consciousness of the cross, a clear and satisfying 
knowledge of his own present position, the conscious- 
ness of obedience. He was doing His Father's will.- 



A GOOD-FRIDAY bERMON. 205 

Behind every pain, behind every shame, that certainty 
must have rested as an abiding strength. We must 
know more of the soul of Jesus than we do, before we 
can understand what strength came to Him from that 
consciousness. " My meat is to do the will of Him that 
sent Me, and to finish His work," He had said when He 
was preaching and working miracles; but now, when the 
will had culminated in this suffering, and He was dying 
because He must obey, there must have been a strength 
and nourishment in the conscious obedience that over- 
whelmed and sank the weakness of the flesh. 

And besides these there must have been the vision of 
the cross. It is impossible that the Redeemer, dying 
for mankind, should not have seen the redeemed world 
stretching out before Him. " If I be lifted up," he had 
said " I shall draw all men unto me." When He was 
lifted up He must have seen them gathering. All the 
far ends of the earth, all the far ends of history, all the 
new depths of experience that should be stirred, — these 
must have lain open before Him. There must have 
flowed strength in upon Him from that vision. It was 
worth while, indeed, with such result before it. No pang 
was too great to be borne, when by the suffering of each 
new pang his soul climbed to the height of yet a little 
wider vision. Only He who sees to the end, and knows 
how wide and how deep the power of redemption is to 
go, can tell how the vision from the cross upheld and 
strengthened the soul of the Redeemer. 

The truth of the cross, the consciousness of the cross, 
the vision of the cross ; the Father's love, His own obe- 
dience, the world's redemption, — these were in the soul 
of the Saviour, sustaining it, feeding it, while he was 



206 A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 

dying. These made the glorious side of the crucifixion. 
And yet they were a part of the crucifixion. They were 
not something wholly foreign, like the wine and myrrh 
given to the sufferer to sustain Him. He reached them 
by, He found them in, His suffering. His death, and all 
that went with it, the sacrifice of ease and favor and 
delight, they brought to Him the assurance of love, the 
joy of obedience, the promise of redemption — the truth, 
the consciousness, and the vision of the cross. Can you 
not see, then, what a light pours into St. Paul's words, 
" I am crucified with Christ " ? It is no cry of pain, 
though the fact of pain is in it. It is not a shout of 
triumph. It is too full of pain for that. But it is 
a deep and satisfied assurance that through the pain, 
through distress and death to much which he had loved, 
he has found what his Saviour found upon His cross, 
— the love of God, the consciousness of obedience, the 
vision of a world redeemed. He had suffered for Christ, 
but by his suffering for Christ he had, giving up his own 
joy which was earthly and selfish, entered into Christ's 
joy which is heavenly and full of love. " I am crucified 
with Christ, nevertheless I live ; yet not I, but Christ 
liveth in me." He had left his own life at the foot of 
the cross. He had climbed up to his dying Lord, and 
shared His death unto sin ; but in sharing that, he had 
shared also the new life unto holiness, and entered into 
the truth of love, the consciousness of obedience, and the 
vision of the world redeemed. That was what Good- 
Friday meant to St. Paul. 

And is it possible that Good-Friday should mean all 
that to us ? Indeed it is. I hope that it does mean all 
that to many and many a one of you who have joined 



A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 207 

in this morning's solemn worship. May I not hope that 
even in this morning's worship the deep meaning has for 
the first time opened its light to some of you ? You are 
crucified with Christ. What shall that mean? That 
you share His pain ? Oh yes ! — all the separation from 
sin, all the self-sacrifice by which alone you could pre- 
serve your own purity and help your brethren, has been 
in you the renewal, the echo, of that terrible giving of 
Himself for truth and man which Christ accomplished. 
But if, as you have sacrificed yourself in any way, there 
has come into you the rich divine assurance of God's love, 
the deep and peaceful joy in obeying God, and far bright 
hopes for your humanity, broken but glorious prospects 
of what an obedience, perfect where yours is stumbling, 
complete where yours is partial, shall some day make 
this world to be ; if all this has come to you upon your 
cross, as it came to the Lord on His, then the glory as 
well as the grief of the crucifixion is renewed in you, and 
the satisfaction as well as the pain of your new life is 
uttered when you say, in soft and solemn words, " I, too, 
am crucified with Christ." 

I see a man setting himself against temptation, con- 
quering his sins, giving up the world for his Lord. It is 
a struggle full of pain. His heart and flesh fail him. 
How can he bear what breaks his whole strength down ? 
And then there comes to him the picture of the Master's 
crucifixion, and, humbly associating his own pain with 
the pain of Him on whose strength he relies, he says, " I 
am crucified with Christ." But as I watch him I am 
sure that something new is coming to him. Deep down 
in that pain of his he finds most unexpected treasures. 
He learns how God loves him. He finds the absolute 



208 A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 

happiness of doing God's will whatever be its consequence. 
And, drawn into the spiritual life, he sees the future glory 
of the world when Jesus shall be its King. He knows 
all this as he never could have known it save by self-sac- 
rifice. Somebody meets him and pities him, and he says, 
" Oh you do not know ; I am crucified indeed ; there is 
pain enough, struggle enough ; but I am crucified with 
Christ. What came to Him upon His cross has come to 
me on mine. He has lifted me up into His privilege. 
It is a glorious thing to be crucified with Christ." 

You have yOur cross, my friend. You do not serve 
your Lord without surrender. There is pain in the duty 
which you do. But if in all your pain you know that 
God's love is becoming a dearer and plainer truth to you, 
and that you are finding the pleasure of obeying God ; 
and that the vision of the world's redemption is growing 
more certain and bright, then you can be more than 
brave ; you can triumph in every task, in every sacrifice. 
Your cross has won something of the glory and beauty of 
your Lord's. Rejoice and be glad, for you are crucified 
with Chi'ist. 

This, then, is the full truth of Good-Friday : Jesus was 
crucified with us, that we might be crucified with Him. 
He entered into our pain, that we might enter into His 
peace. He shared the shame of the thieves, that Paul 
might share His glory. This double truth was manifest 
at the time of Christ's suffering. You remember the 
penitent thief. As their crosses were lifted side by side, 
he saw Christ entering into his wretchedness. Before 
the feeble, tortured breath had left the body, he had 
entered into Christ's glory. First Christ was crucified 
with him, and afterwards he was crucified with Christ. 



A GOOD-FRIDAY SERMON. 209 

The saved souls that have followed have entered deeper 
than he entered then into the knowledge of the Lord ; 
but even then, in one of those in whom was shown the 
wretchedness of sin, was likewise shown the power of the 
new salvation. 

And now the scene of that terrible day has come back 
to us once more. We have knelt under its shadow to- 
gether. Oh, ray dear people, have we indeed entered 
into its double truth? Christ on this day entered into 
our shame. Deep into its very heart He entered. The 
blackness of its darkness was around Him. But the 
purpose of His sacrifice was that we might be brought to 
Him. We have not learnt the whole if we have only 
felt His condescension. Not till He who has stooped to 
lis has lifted us up to Him must we be satisfied. Not 
till He who hangs upon the cross beside us has said to us, 
" To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise." 

Oh, that by God's grace we may to-day accept anew 

His sacrifice for us and give ourselves to Him through 

every self-surrender, that He may do for us all that He 

died to do. 

14 



XII. 

AN EASTER SERMON. 

"And He laid His right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am 
tho first and tlie last : I am He that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I 
am alive for evermore. Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death." 
— Rev. i. 17, 18. 

There is only one subject for to-day. Upon this 
morning when the grave was broken and Jesus Christ 
arose, His resurrection with all that it means for us must 
claim our thoughts. Instinctively the minds of all men 
turn that way. I think that many men who could not 
help hesitating if you asked them whether they really 
believed in the historical fact of Christ's arising from 
the dead, and men whose whole habit of thought is ma- 
terial, bound up with forces that the eye and hand can 
measure, still feel a certain sense of exaltation, the leap- 
ing of some unknown spiritual possibility when Easter 
morning opens on the earth. It is something that mortal 
men have been able even to imagine an immortality, and 
to find pleasure in telling one another that one at least 
of all the billions who have died and been buried has 
broken through the tomb and lived upon the earth again. 
I am sure that many men, blindly believing, who could 
tell little of what the Resurrection really means, have 
yet got at the heart of its meaning this morning in a 
sense of freedom and openness, of the largeness of life 
and the liveness of God, which they have not felt, per- 



AN EASTER SERMON. 211 

haps, since last Easter Day. Easter is remarkable for 
this, that it seems to take the most stupendous thoughts 
and through the familiar personalitj^ of Jesus bring them 
to men's apprehension and affection. " Christ is arisen ! " 
" Christ is arisen ! " Men say to one another. " Arisen ! " 
Do we know what that means? The one invincible 
power of the world conquered ! The one inevitable fate 
of man avoided ! Death tasted and then laid aside like 
a cup that the lips would not drink ! The most inexo- 
rable of natural laws, as we call them, broken through ! 
Life and divinity claiming their preeminence ! These 
are stupendous thoughts. And yet our souls are holding 
them to-day. The very children have taken these stu- 
pendous thoughts into their simple minds. They have 
been made real to us through the personal experience of 
Christ whom we love, and they have been translated by 
our own instincts and the prophecies of our own needs. 
It is to those who have gone up the path to the empty 
tomb full of love for Jesus that the great truth of His 
resurrection has been shown, and their own truest long- 
ings have been made beautiful and clear. Just as these 
flowers have taken the infinite and mysterious forces of 
nature, and put them into these clear shapes of visible 
beauty, so Easter, the flower of the year, takes the im- 
measurable truths of life and immortality, and holds 
them to us in a beauty that we all can see and love. 

I have taken for my Easter text the account which 
Christ gives of Himself after His resurrection and as- 
cension. It is evident to any thoughtful reader of the 
Gospels that, with all their joy in their risen Lord, the 
disciples were in a strange bewilderment and puzzle all 
the time that they were with Him. They loved Him 



212 AN EASTER SERMON. 

just as much as ever, but they could not seem to lay hold 
of Him as they used to when He walked with them and 
talked with them, and they were first learning of His 
nature and His love. After His resurrection He eludes 
them. Their hearts burned within them in His com- 
pany, but He went and came in strange, mysterious 
ways. They pondered His mystical and subtle Avords, 
and always seemed to be trying to find out fully what 
this Lord of theirs who had arisen from the dead really 
was. Evidently He was something more than they had 
thought Him when they followed Him in Galilee. And 
all the Christian world, since, has echoed their loving 
curiosity, and longed to know more of the conqueror 
of death and the Saviour of the world. It is good for us 
to have this passage in the Revelation, in which Christ 
speaks, and declares Himself, " I am He that liveth, and 
was dead ; and behold I am alive for evermore ; and have 
the keys of hell and of death." Let us try to see some- 
thing of the meaning of that sublime self-description of 
the risen Christ. See what Christ says of Himself then. 
First, " I am He that liveth." That word, " liveth," 
is a word of continuous, perpetual life. It describes 
the eternal existence which has no beginning and no 
end ; which, considered in its purity and perfectness, 
has no present and no past, but one eternal and un- 
broken present, — one eternal now. It is the "I Am" 
of the Jehovah who spoke to Moses. " He that liveth " 
is the Living One ; He whose life is The Life, complete 
in itself, and including all other lives within itself. My 
dear friends, if anything has come to us to make us feel 
what a fragmentaiy thing our human life is, I think there 
is no greater knowledge for us to win than that the life 



AN EASTER SERMON. 213 

of one who loves us as Christ loves us is an eternal life, 
with the continuance and the unchangeableness of eter- 
nity. See how we alter ; how we make plans and finish 
them, or give them up ; how we slip on from one stage 
of our career into another ; how past, present, and future 
are forever confusing our existence ; how we die, and oth- 
ers come on in our places to run through the same mys- 
tery and bewilderment of change that we have run. How 
our heads ache and our hearts ache with it all some- 
' times. " Is this living ? " we exclaim. " This is merely 
touching upon life. Is it living ? Is it not like the 
touching of an insect on the surface of a river that is 
hundreds of miles long? His wing just brushes it at one 
point in its long course, and ruffles it for a second, and 
then is gone again, and that is all he has to do with it. 
And that is all we have to do with life. Is this living? " 
And then there comes this voice from Christ : " I am 
He that liveth," He declares — continuous, eternal life. 
There is a large, long life that is not transitory. When 
we know that, then, just as the children's lives set them- 
selves into the life of their father which seems to them 
really eternal; just as the leaves coming and going, grow- 
ing and dropping, find their reason and consistency in the 
long, unchanging life of the tree on which they grow ; 
so our lives find their place in this long, unchanging life 
of Christ, and lose the vexation of their own ever-shift- 
ing pasts and futures in the perpetual present of His 
being. It is the thought of an eternal God that really 
gives consistency to the fragmentary lives of men, the 
fragmentary history of the world. A Christ that liveth 
redeems and rescues into His eternity the broken, tem- 
porary lives and works of His disciples. 



214 AN EASTER SERxMON. 

That is the first thing, then. This Christ is He that 
liveth. But then go on. See what a wonderful thing 
comes next. " I am He that liveth, and was dead." We 
do not begin to know how wonderful that is. Remember 
the eternally living, the very life of all lives. And yet 
into that life of lives death has come, — as an episode, an 
incident. I do not speak now of the immense provoca- 
tion, the immense love that brought so strange a thing as 
the submission to death on the part of the Ever-living 
One. I speak only of this, that when death came to Him 
it was seen to be not the end of life, but only an event 
in life. It did not close His being, but it was only an 
experience which that being underwent. That spiritual 
existence which had been going on forever, on which the 
short existences of men had been strung into consistency, 
now came and submitted itself to that which men had 
always been submitting to. And lo ! instead of being 
what men had feared it was, what men had hardly 
dared to hope that it was not, the putting out of life, it 
was seen to be only the changing of the circumstances 
of life, without any real power over the real principle of 
life ; any more power than the cloud has over the sun 
that it obscures ; or than the ocean has over the bubble 
of air that it buries fathoms deep, but whose buoyant 
nature it cannot destroy, nor hinder it from struggling 
towards and sometime reaching to the surface of the 
watery mass that covers it. Tluit was the wonder of 
Christ's death. As He drew near to it He himself trem- 
bled. It was an experience of all His creation, but He 
had never felt it. To His humanity, His assumed flesh, 
it seemed terrible. Gethsemane bears witness how ter- 
rible it seemed. But He passed into it for love of us. 



AN EASTER SERMON. 215 

And as He came out from it He declared its nature. 
" It is an experience of life, not an end of life. Life goes 
on through it and comes out unharmed. Look at me. I 
am He that liveth, and was dead ! " 

But this is not all. Still the description goes on and 
unfolds itself. " He that liveth, and was dead," Christ 
says, " and behold I am alive for evermore." This ex- 
istence after death is special, and different. It is not a 
mere reassertion of what had been already included in 
His great word, "I am He that liveth." It is something 
added. It is an assurance that in the continued life which 
has once passed through the experience of death there is 
something new, another sympathy, the only one which 
before could have been lacking with his brethi'en whose 
lot it is to die, and so a helpfulness to them which could 
not otherwise have been, even in His perfect love. This 
new life, — the life that has conquered death by tasting 
it, wliicli has enriched itself with a before unknown sym- 
pathy with men whose lives are forever tending towards 
and at last all going down into the darkness of the grave, 
— this life stretches on and out forever. It is to know 
no ending. So long as there are men living and dying, 
so long above them and around them there shall be the 
Christ, the God-man, who liveth, and was dead, and is 
alive for evermore. 

And now think what that great self-description of the 
Saviour means, and what it is to us. What do we need, 
we men ? Ah, the happiest and most satisfied lives 
among us have had some glimpses into the depths of 
their own unsatisfactoriness ; and the most eager and 
earnest, and th^ sick and the suffering, live in the con- 
sciousness of their deep wants all the time. Here are 



21G AN EASTER SERMON. 

we poor waifs upon the earth, — here with our fragments 
of existence, — here with the mystery of our beginning 
and the half-understood purpose of our being here at all ; 
and dark, clear, inevitable before all of us there is 
looming up the mighty wall of death. In through its 
narrow door every one of the millions who has lived has 
passed. Up to that same door every one of us is walking. 
Each throbbing second is a footfall that brings us up a 
little nearer. And beyond ? Not one of those we have 
seen enter has come back to tell us what there is beyond, 
to tell us that there really is any such beyond as that 
at which our resolute, unreasonable vitality guesses and 
hopes in spite of all the darkness. This is man's life. 
Just think of it. And then, as you sit thinking of his 
fragmentariness, his certainty of death, his doubt about 
a future, let this voice come to you, a voice clear with 
personality, and sweet and strong with love : " I am He 
that liveth, and was dead ; and am alive for evermore." 
" He that liveth ! " And at once your fragment of life 
falls into its place in the eternity of life that is bridged 
by His being. " He that was dead ! " And at once death 
changes from the terrible end of life into a most mys- 
terious but no longer terrible experience of life. " He 
that is alive for evermore ! " And not merely there is a 
future beyond the grave, but it is inhabited by One who 
speaks to us, who went there by the way that we must 
go, who sees us and can help us as we make our way 
alonsr, and will receive us when we come there. Is not 
all changed ? The devils of discontent, despair, self- 
ishness, sensuality, how they are scattered before that 
voice, really heard, of the risen and everlasting Christ. 
He stands before the door of His tomb and speaks, and 



AN EASTER SERMON. 217 

these dark forms that have enchained the souls and fet- 
tered the activities of men fall on their faces, like the 
Roman soldiers, who in the gray dawn of the morning 
saw Him come forth from the tomb of the Arimathean, 
and trembled with fright, and knew that their day was 
over, and that the prisoner they thought was dead was 
indeed too strong for them to keep. Would God I could 
make you hear that voice on this Easter morning ! 

And yet we have not finished all our Lord's descrip- 
tion of Himself, though we have been led on to anticipate 
in part what He has still to say. We have talked thus 
far only of Christ's resurrection. We have not spoken 
of the resurrection of His disciples which He makes clear 
and certain by His own. But see how He goes on : "I 
am He that liveth, and was dead ; and behold I am alive 
for evermore. And I have the keys of hell and of death." 
Hell of course means just Hades, that unseen place, 
that place of departed spirits in which our creed ex- 
presses its belief. Chi-ist then, having experienced death, 
has the keys of death to open its meaning, and to guide 
the way througli it for those who are to die like Him. 
It is because He died that He holds the keys of death. 
Can we not understand that ? Do we not know how any 
soul that has passed through a great experience holds 
the keys of that experience, so that as He sees another 
coming up to it just as ignorantly and fearfully as he 
came, he can run up to this new-comer and open the 
door for him, show him on what side this experience is 
best entered, lead him through the dark passages of it 
where he could not easily find his way alone, and at last 
bring him out into the splendor of the liglit beyond. I 
am tempted to stop and think of this with you for a mo- 



218 AN EASTER SERMON. 

ment, by the way, for this is what binds men's lives most 
closely and most vitally together. Suppose you have had 
a life of great sorrow. Or, suppose you have had some 
one great sorrow in your life. It is not a mere supposi- 
tion. I look into your faces and I know how true it is 
of many and many of you, my people. Well, you have 
suffered, and come through your suffering into the light. 
And as you stand there looking back, who is it that 
comes up the road where you remember to have walked 
years back, when you were a boy, the road that led you 
to your suft'ering ? You look, and lo ! another light and 
careless heart is coming, singing, up the road by which 
you came. You know where the road leads to, but he 
has not yet caught sight of the trial that blocks it. Sud- 
denly he comes in sight of that trial, and starts back. 
He stands in fright. He trembles. He is ready to run. 
" Father, save me from it," you hear him cry. What 
can you do for him ? If you are wise and willing, you 
go down and meet him, and you hold out before him, in 
some sympathetic act or word, the key of your experi- 
ence. " Let me show you," you say, " not because I am 
any greater or better than you, but only because the 
Father led me there first. Let me show you the way 
into, the way through, and the way out of this sorrow 
which you cannot escape. Into it by perfect submission ; 
through it with implicit obedience ; out of it into purified 
passions and entire love." He sees the key in your hand. 
He sees the experience in your face, and so he trusts you. 
How useless it is to go to any brother without the key, — 
without the experience of that which he has got to meet. 
He thanks us and turns away. Who are we that we 
should guide him? It is so with temptation. It is so 



AN EASTER SERMON. 219 

with repentance. They who have undergone and over- 
come stand with their keys to open the portals of life's 
great emergencies to their brethren. The wondrous power 
of experience ! And see how beautiful and ennobling this 
makes our sorrows and temptations. Every stroke of sor- 
row that issues into light and joy is God putting into your 
hand the key of that sorrow to unlock it for all the poor 
souls whom you may see approaching it, through all your 
future life. It is a noble thing to take that key and use 
it. There are no nobler lives on earth than those of men 
and women who have passed through many experiences of 
many sorts, and who now go about with calm and happy 
and sober faces, holding their keys, some golden and some 
iron, and finding their joy in opening the gates of these 
experiences to younger souls, and sending them into them 
full of intelligence and hope and trust. Such lives, I 
think, we may all pray to grow into as we grow older, and 
pass through more and more of the experiences of life. 

And now this is just exactly what Jesus does for us by 
His resurrection. Having the keys of death and hell, 
He comes to us as we are drawing near to death, and 
He opens the doors on both sides of it, and lets us look 
through it, and shows us immortality. Now you see we 
have passed over from Himself to us. Not merely He 
lives forever, but so shall we ; for us, too, death shall be 
not an end, but an experience ; and beyond it for us, just 
as for Him, stretches immortality. Because He lives, we 
shall live also. 

And now shall we ti-y to tell to one another what it is 
to be immortal, and to know it ; what it is to have death 
broken down so that life stretches out beyond it, the 
same life as this, opening, expanding, but forever the 



220 AN EASTER SERMON. 

same essentially; just as to Him that always liveth the 
life that He liveth evermore is the same after the death 
on Calvary, though with some entrance of somethiug — • 
some new knowledge, and the sympatliy of a new experi- 
ence — that was not there before? This is certainly what 
I want to tell on Easter Day to all these men and women 
who are thinking tenderly and longingly of their own 
dead; perhaps thinking fearfully of their own death to- 
day. But, as I try, I am rejoiced indeed that there is so 
much in the everlasting associations of the day to speak 
to you what I know I must fail to speak. But let me 
try. 

And first of all I think of the immense and noble free- 
dom from many of the most trying and vexatious of our 
temptations which comes to a man to whom the curtain 
has been lifted and the vail rent in twain. Let me fancy 
myself a man who has no vision beyond this world. Let 
me bow myself down, and shut myself in, until all the 
thought of my life stops sharp and short there at the 
gi'ave. I am going to work along here, till when ? per- 
haps till to-morrow morning, perhaps till fifty years 
hence: what matters it ? Certainly for a very minute of 
time, and then it will be all over; what I do I must not 
only begin, I must finish here and now. All my desires, 
those deep, deep wishes that are in my soul because I am 
a man, the desire to accomplish something, the desire to 
please, the desire to discover and display myself, — all of 
them good desires, all of them parts of my humanity, — 
they must all be satisfied before the curtain falls or they 
can never find satisfaction, for that falling of the curtain 
is the end of all. What a coward I become ! What a 
poor, timid, limited, temporary thing ! I must attempt 



AN EASTER SERMON. 221 

nothing so large that I cannot finish it before the sun 
goes down. I must desire nothing that this life cannot 
bestow. If I want to please, whom shall I please ? Only 
these cramped and crippled and half-judging men about 
me, to whom I must degrade myself to win their honor. 
If I want to make myself known, I must take this crude 
self which I am now, and hold it up and make that self 
known, for it is " now or never," since the end may come 
at once. How superficial, restless, impatient ! what a 
slave I come to be ! Where is my independence ? How 
the world has me down and treads on me ! — treads me 
into the dust and mire of the present, since I know no 
future world into which I can lift myself up and run 
away. And now beside me all the time there is another 
man, and the difference between him and me is this, that 
he believes in immortality. Somehow he has got hold of 
the truth of resurrection. To him, death is a jar, a 
break, a deep mysterious change, but not the end of life. 
I know that men may claim to believe that, and yet live 
on like dogs. Men may claim to believe that, and yet be 
slaves and cowards. But this man really believes it ; 
and see what it does for him. See how free it makes 
him. How it breaks his tyrannies ! He can undertake 
works of self-culture, or the development of truth, far, far 
too vast for the earthly life of any Methuselah to finish, 
and yet smile calmly and work on when men tell him 
that he will d'm before his work is done. Die ! Shall 
not the sculptor sleep a hundred times before the statue 
he begins to-day is finished, and wake a hundred times 
more, ready for his work, bringing with a hundred new 
mornings to his work the strength and the visions that 
have come to him in his slumber ? He can desire to 



222 AN EASTER SERIION. 

please, and yet be perfectly patient as he waits for a 
" well done" that will fall on his ears out of divine lips 
when this world and its shows are over. He can desire to 
show himself, and yet live in obscurity content, sure that 
some day — what does it matter when to him who has 
eternity to live in ? — God will call him, and bid men see 
in him the work of love and grace. Can you picture the 
independence of a man like that ? What are my tempta- 
tions to him ? How he walks over them with feet that 
follow his far-seeing sight like a man that strides with his 
firm steps and far-off sight and never sees the pebble in 
the path behind which a crawling insect is blocked and 
hindered. Sometimes when one is travelling through a 
foreign country it happens that he stops a day or two, a 
week or two, in some small village, where everything is 
local, which has little communication with the outside 
world ; where the people are born and grow up, and 
grow old and die without thinking of leaving their little 
nest among the mountains. The traveller shares for a 
little while their local life, shuts himself in to their 
limitations. But all the while he is freer than they are ; 
he is not tyrannized over by the small prescriptions and 
petty standards that are despots to them. He knows 
of, and belongs to, a larger world. He is kept free 
by the sense of the world beyond the mountains, from 
which he came and to which he is going back again. 
And so when a man, strong in the conviction of immor- 
tality, really counts himself a stranger and a pilgrim 
among the multitudes who know no home, no world but 
this ; then he is free among them ; free from the worldly- 
tyrannies that bind them ; free from their temptations 
to be cowardly and mean. The wall of death, beyond 



AN easier' SERMON. 223 

which they never look, is to hhn only a mountain that 
can be crossed, from whose top he shall see eternity, 
where he belono;s. This is the freedom of the best child- 
hood and the best old age, these two ends of life in which 
the sense of immortality is realest and most true. 

How good it would be for us if this bright Easter Day 
could show us immortality and so set some of us free. 
There are some things that you are afraid to do, some 
right word you are afraid to speak, some wasteful or 
wicked habit you are afraid to give up, some self-culture 
that you are afraid to undertake, some attempt to be use- 
ful in some little enterprising way from which you shrink 
out of a feeble fear of what people will say about it, out 
of a fear of the little world. You would get rid of that 
fear instantly if you realized your immortality and stood 
in the midst of the great world of your eternal life, as 
the mists that have hung thick and damp in the valleys 
scatter and are lost as soon as they struggle up into the 
free air above the hill-tops. What is there in scorn or 
criticism, that dies the day it is born, that can terrify, 
however it may pain, the man who is to live forever ? 
He is free. He has entered into the glorious liberty of 
the children of God. 

And so, again, the whole position of duty is elevated 
by the thought, the knowledge of immortality. Duty is 
a vast power and needs a vast world to work in. I do 
not deny, God forbid ! I love to watch the power of duty 
working in a man who is unable to believe that the life 
he lives is any more than an insect's life. It is a dogged 
stoical thing, but there is something that makes us love 
it with a love that is all the tenderer because it is so 
melancholy, in the stout resolve that says, " I do not 



224 AN EASTER SERMON. 

dare to think that I sliall live after this life is over, 
and it may be over with the next breath I draw, but 
nevertheless, all blind and useless as it seems, I will not 
do what my conscience calls a wrong thing, and I will do 
what my conscience says is right, while I am iiere upon 
the earth." There is something beautiful about that, but 
how sad and dark it is. It is a resolution for rare souls. 
Who ever dreams that the whole race could begin to live 
on an impulse of duty as frigid and austere as that ? But 
now let Christ come to that brave man, holding the keys 
of death and hell. Oh, brave man, do not be so in love 
with your own bravery as to insist upon the hard stoical 
duty that knows no future, when He opens before you 
the spiritual future that really belongs to every dutiful 
deed, and shows jou a world in which these hard seeds 
that you are sowing now will bear their fruit. It seems 
to me that this day is a day for strong and cheerful 
resolutions, because it is a day when, with the spiritual 
world open before us, we can all catch sight of the des- 
tiny of duty, — of how, some time or other, every good 
habit is to conquer and every good deed wear its crown. 
Come, take that task of yours which you have been 
hesitating before, and shirking and walking around and 
around, and on this Easter Day lift it up and do it. It is 
your duty. That which sounds hai'd and cold on other 
days ought to sound warm and inspiring to-day. For to- 
day we can see that duty is worth while. Duty is the 
one thing on earth that is so vital that it can go through 
death and come to glory. Duty is the one seed that has 
such life in it that it can lie as long as God will in the 
mummy hand of death, and yet be ready any moment to 
start into new growth in the new soil where He shall set 



AN EASTER SERMON. 225 

it. So let us all consecrate our Easter Day by resolutely 
taking up some new duty which we know we ought to 
do. We bind ourselves so by a new chain to eternity, to 
the eternity of Him who, for the joy that was set before 
Him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set 
down at God's right hand. 

I had wanted to speak again of the new life that is 
given to friendship, to all our best relations to one an- 
other by the power of immortality. But I must not 
dwell on this or much besides. To speak about immor- 
tality is like speaking about life. There is nothing that 
it does not touch. I think that the two things above all 
others that have made men in all ages believe in immor- 
tality, apart, so far as we know, from any revelation save 
that which is written in the human heart, have been the 
broken lives and the broken friendships of the world. 
Men could not believe that this young life, broken off so 
suddenly, was done forever. It suggested its own con- 
tinuance. And when they had been growing into sjanjaa- 
tliy with some rich and true soul for years, and were just 
catching sight of new immense regions in him that were 
still to be comprehended, it was impossible for them to 
stand by his coffin and think that it was all over. In- 
stinctively friendship triumphed over the grave. Love 
was too strong ff)r death ! Aiid yet, what terrible mis- 
givings ! Perhaps there is no more ! Perhaps it is all 
over! Until, to the soul standing with all its question- 
ings before the door of the tomb, He who liveth and was 
dead came as He came to Martha, and holding out the 
key of death, said the great final conclusive words, 
" Thy brother shall rise again." Men's souls leaped to 
that word because they wanted to believe it, and had not 

15 



•22G . AN EASTER SERMON. 

dared wholly to believe it till He showed them that it 
was true. And now if we believe in Him, we do believe 
it, and death is really changed to us, and the dead are 
really living by the assurance of the living Christ. It is 
a beautiful connection, one whose mysterious beauty we 
are always learning more and more, tliat the deeper our 
spiritual experience of Christ becomes, the more our 
soul's life really hangs on His life as its savior and con- 
tinual friend, the more real becomes to us the unquenched 
life of those who have gone from us to be with Him. In 
those moments when Christ is most real to me, when He 
lives in the centre of my desires and I am resting most 
heavily upon His help, in those moments I am surest 
that the dead are not lost, that those whom this Christ 
in whom I trust has taken He is keeping. The more He 
lives to me the more they live. I want to make you feel 
this power of the living Christ to-day. Another year 
has gone from us since last Easter and taken its dead 
with it. Out of your families and out of this parish 
family of ours they have gone. Your hearts are telling 
them over as I speak. The little child and the tired old 
man. The brave and hopeful boys and girls carrying 
their hope and courage and aspiration into other worlds, 
and leaving behind them memories in which the beauty 
and the dearness and the pride, struggle with the sad- 
ness till we cannot separate them or tell which is the 
greatest. The young mother has left her children. The 
husband has left the wife. The wife has gone down the 
dark way before the husband. The bright and sunny 
friend whom many knew, and whom all who knew him 
loved for his kind heart and ready charity and cheerful 
temper and patient spirit and constant unselfishness and 



AN EASTER SERMON. 227 

simple faitli. All these have gone from us to the world 
of God. As I wrote this I turned to our parish book, 
and looked down the list, and it was indeed a long one. 
The old and the young, their deaths stood written there 
together like the mingled graves in a graveyard. There 
were more old than young, and yet the young were not 
few. But as I read and thought of Easter Day, I could 
not think that they were gone. On the first Easter Day 
the graves were opened, and the dead came forth and 
went into the holy city, and were seen of many. If the 
city of our heart is holy with the presence of a living 
Christ, then the dear dead will come to us and we shall 
know they are not dead but living, and bless Him who 
has been their Redeemer, and rejoice in the work that 
they are doing for Him in His perfect world, and press 
on joyously towards our own redemption, not fearing 
even the grave, since by its side stands He whom we 
know and love, who has the keys of death and hell. 

A living Christ, dear friends ! the old, ever new, ever 
blessed Easter truth ! He liveth ; He was dead ; He is 
alive for evermore. Oh that everything dead and formal 
might go out of our creed, out of our life, out of our 
heart to-day. He is alive ! Do you believe it ? What 
are you dreary for, O mourner ? what are you hesitating 
for, O worker ? what are you fearing death for, O man ? 
Oh, if we could only lift up our heads and live with 
Him ; live new lives, high lives, lives of hope and love 
and holiness, to which death should be nothing but the 
breaking away of the last cloud, and the letting of the 
life out to its completion. 

May God give us some such blessing for our Easter 
Day. 



XIII. 

A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 

"For through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Fatlier."— 

Eph. ii. 18. 

To-day is Trinity-Sunday. That truth from which our 
church takes its name ; that truth which is the centre 
and circumference of our faith, this one day is specially 
set apart for its commemoration, and we are to talk of 
it with one another. But nothing could be worse for us 
than to think that the truth of the Trinity was one that 
could be separated from all others and laid aside by itself, 
to be specially taken up and discussed upon a given day. 
Why, we are preaching on the Trinity always. I should 
count any Sunday's work unfitly done in which the Trin- 
ity was not the burden of our preaching. For when we 
preach the Fatherhood of God we preach His divinity ; 
when we point to Christ the perfect Saviour, it is a Di- 
vine Redeemer that we declare ; and when we plead with 
men to hear the voice and yield to the persuasions of the 
Holy Spirit, the Comforter into whose comfort we invite 
them is Divine. The divinity of Father, Son, and Holy 
Ghost, this is our Gospel. By this Gospel we look for sal- 
vation. It is a Gospel to be used, to be believed in, and 
to be lived by ; not merely to be kept and admired and 
discussed and explained. But, as a telescope which is 
valued for its precious uses may be sometimes taken down 



A TRINITY-SUNDAY SEEMON. 229 

and its parts examined, its beautiful construction ana- 
lyzed, so the truth of the Trinity may sometimes be made 
the subject of a special lecture. Only we are always to 
remember that the truth is given to us, not to be lectured 
on, but to be lived by ; as the telescope is precious be- 
cause it can sweep the sky and separate the star-dust 
into recognizable worlds ; and not because its parts are 
beautifully adjusted and its whole construction is a mir- 
acle of mechanism. There is always a tendency to value 
doctrines for their symmetry and interior consistency, 
instead of for their uses ; as if we built a new steam- 
engine and kept it under a glass-house, instead of setting 
it upon the road. Its efficiency upon the road is the 
only true test of whether it is really worthy of the hom- 
age that we would pay it in its crystal shrine. Let us 
remember this always as we talk and think about the 
doctrine of the Trinity. 

The doctrine of the Trinity is the description of what 
we know of God. We have no right to say that it is the 
description of God ; for what there may be in Deity of 
which we have no knowledge, how can we tell ? We are 
only sure that the divine life is infinitely greater than 
our humanity can comprehend ; and we are sure, too, that 
not even a revelation in the most perfect .form, through 
the most perfect medium conceivable, could make known 
to the human intelligence anything in God save that 
which has relationship to human life. Man may reveal 
liimself to the brutes, and the revelation may be clear 
and correct so far as it can go, but it must have its limit. 
Only that part of man can cross the line and show itself 
to the porc(>ption of that lower world which finds in 
brutedom some point which it can touch. Our strength 



230 A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 

may reveal itself to their fear ; our kindness to their 
power of love ; some part of our wisdom, even, to their 
dim capacity of education ; but all the while there is a 
vast manhood of intellect, of taste, of spirituality, of 
which tliey never know. And so I am sure that the 
divine nature is three persons, but one God ; bat how 
much more than that I cannot know. That deep law 
which runs through all life, by which the higher any nat- 
ure is, the more manifold and simple at once, the more 
full of complexity and unity at once, it grows, is easily 
accepted as applicable to the highest of all natures, — 
God. In the manifoldness of His being these three per- 
sonal existences. Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, easily 
make themselves known to the human life. I tell the 
story of them, and that is my doctrine of the Trinity. 
But let me not say that that is all. To other worlds 
of other needs, and so of other understandings (for our 
needs are alwaj's the avenues for our intelligence), other 
sides of the personal force of the divine life must have 
issued. It is not for us to catalogue and inventory 
Deity ; only in humble gratitude and reverence to bear 
our witness of the manifestation of God to us for our 
salvation. And so our doctrine of the Trinity is our ac- 
count of what we know of God. 

This idea seems to be borne out by our text. Hear 
it again : " Through Christ Jesus we all have access by 
one Spirit unto the Father." St. Paul is not describing 
God. He is recounting the story that he loves to tell, 
— the story of man's salvation. That story is always 
breaking from his eager lips. In his encouragements 
and his rebukes, in his consolations and his arguments, 
the history of man's salvation to God, through Jesus, by 



A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 231 

the Spirit, is the burden of the whole. He is telling it 
always. That is what he lives for. He is telling it here. 
He does not define God. With no confident boldness 
does his sight try to sweep around the infinite circle of 
Deity and include it all ; but only the God of man, the 
God of the human salvation, whom he knows with his 
whole heart, Him he announces with his ardent lips. 
This is the first thing we notice, — that Paul describes 
only the God whom man can know. 

And then the next thing we notice is the completeness 
with which this God, this part of God, is apprehended 
and depicted. See what he says. He is describing man's 
salvation. It is one single thing, — the saving of a man. 
Here is the sinner in his sinfulness ; there is the saint in 
his glory. It is the same man still, and the whole act, 
from the beginning to the end, — the act that took him 
in his sinfulness and lifted him thence, and set him in his 
glory, is one single act. It stands a unit among the 
works of God's omnipotence. It is one throb of the all- 
loving heart ; it is one movement of the Almighty arm. 
And yet this simple act, salvation, is clearly distinguished 
into its parts. See how clearly St. Paul discriminates 
them. Every act is made up of a pui^pose, a method, and 
a power. And so the purpose and the method and the 
power are here. What is the purpose or the end ? " To 
the Father we all have access." What is the method ? 
" Through Christ Jesus." What is the power ? " By 
the Spirit." Through Christ Jesus we all have access, 
by one Spirit, unto the Father. In this one total act, 
the end, the method, and the power are distinguishable. 
Each stands out separate and clear. And what is more, 
each is distinctly personal. A personal name is given to 



232 A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 

the designation of each element. This salvation, which 
is all the work of God, first, last, and midmost, has its 
divine personalities distinct for its end and its method 
and its power. It is a salvation to the Father, through 
the Son, and by the Spirit. The salvation is all one ; 
yet in it method, end, and power are recognizable. It 
is a three in one. 

Let us look into this a little more deeply. The per- 
fection of any act consists in the elevation and the har- 
mony of these three elements ; its end, its method, and 
its power. Take, for instance, the act of a boy's educa- 
tion. It may extend over twenty years, but it is capable 
of being considered as one act still from the time it 
begins in the nursery to the time it culminates in his 
profession. Now the perfection of that education will 
depend upon the perfection of its end, its method, and 
its power, and upon their being harmonious with and 
suitable to one another ; each must be worthy of the 
rest. For instance, if the end be low, if no high ideal 
of scholarsliip and character is set up at the first, and 
kept clear all along, you may give him the best books 
and the best teachers, you may inspire him with the 
most eager enthusiasm ; but you turn out only a half- 
taught scholar, a half-made man, as the result. The 
end was not worthy of the method and the power. Or, 
again, you set the highest standard up to be aimed at, 
and you put the purest ambitions into the boy's nature ; 
but you furnish only poor means, poor schools, poor 
teachers, and once more the education is imperfect. The 
method is not worthy of the end and the power. Or, 
again, you make the ideal perfect, and you provide all 
the appliances of study at their very best ; but you put 



A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 233 

only some low or mercenary impulse into the scholar's 
heart, perhaps a mere servile submission to your au- 
thority, perhaps only a selfish idea of the money he is 
going to get out of his learning, and again a most im- 
perfect product comes. This time the power has been un- 
worthy of the method and the- end. The ideal is the 
end to which, the school training is the method through 
which, the ambition is the power by which, the act of edu- 
cation is completed. Only when these three are one, only 
when each is perfect and so worthy of the others, only 
when in their perfect unity they entirely cooperate, 
while in their essential diversity they minister to one 
another, — only then, when the end is sacred, and the 
means are sacred, and the power is sacred, does the sa- 
cred result go forth into the world, and the boy's educa- 
tion is complete. 

This is an illustration. Instead of a boy's education, 
put a man's salvation. That is the perfect education, of 
which all others ai*e but types. And there we look for 
and we find the same harmony of end, method, and 
power. Make either unwortliy of the others and the 
salvation is not complete. If it be not to the Father, 
the Son's redemption is in vain. If it be not through the 
Son, the Fatlier waits and the Spirit moves for naught. 
If it be not by the Spirit, the Father's heart stands open 
and the method of grace is perfect, but the unmoved 
soul stands inactive and unsaved. The Scripture reve- 
lation comes to tell us that end, method, and power, all 
are perfect, and each must tluis be woi'thy of the rest. 
The three are one. Each is eternal, and yet as the old 
creed cries, " There are not three Eternals, but One Eter- 
nal." Each is God, and vet " there are not three Gods, 



234 A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 

but one God," — not three salvations, but one salvation, 
with its equal end and method and power, and so by the 
Trinity in Unity the soul is saved. 

And now, again, let us look at this more carefully in 
its several parts. The end of the human salvation is 
" access to the Father." That is the first truth of our 
religion — that the source of all is meant to be the end of 
all, that as we all came forth from a divine Creator, so it 
is into divinity that we are to return and to find our final 
rest and satisfaction, not in ourselves, nor in one another, 
but in the omnipotence, the omniscience, the perfectness, 
and the love of God. Now we are vei-y apt to take it 
for granted, that however we may differ in our defini- 
tions and our belief of the deity of the Son and of the 
Holy Spirit, we are all at one, there can be and there is 
no hesitation, about the deity of the Father. God is di- 
vine. God is God. And no doubt we do all assent in 
words to such a belief ; but when we think what we 
mean by that word God ; when we remember what we 
mean by " Father," namely, the first source and the final 
satisfaction of a dependent nature ; and then when we 
look around and see such multitudes of people living as 
if there were no higher source for their being than acci- 
dent, and no higher satisfaction for their being than 
selfishness, do we not feel that there is need of a con- 
tinual and most earnest preaching by word and act, from 
every pulpit of influence to which we can mount, of the 
divinity of the Father. Why, take a man who is utterly 
absox'bed in the business of this world. How eager he is ; 
his hands are knocking at every door ; his voice is crying 
out for admittance into every secret place and treasure- 
house ; he is all earnestness and restlessness. He is try- 



A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 235 

ing to come to something, ti-ying to get access, and to 
■what ? To the best and richest of that earthly struct- 
ui-e from which his hfe seems to himself to have issued. 
Counting himself the child of this world, he is giving 
himself up with a filial devotion to his father. He is the 
product in his tastes and his capacities of this social and 
commercial machinery which seems to be the mill out of 
which men's characters are turned. It is the society and 
the business of the world that have made him what he is, 
and so he gives up all that he is to the society or the 
business that created him. The source of life and the 
satisfaction of life — think how man 5^ of *us look for neither 
of them any farther back or any farther on than this 
routine in which we live. We devote ourselves to it ; 
we deck it with all the graces we can bestow upon it, 
because there is no higher fatherhood present to our 
thoughts, because we know no loftier God. Now to 
such a man what is the first revelation that you Avant to 
make. Is it not the divinity of the Father. Remember 
that wonderful passage in the story of the Passover, 
where Jesus, with His agony before Him, is just rising to 
work His homely parable of washing the disciples' feet. 
And the description of the act is this : " Jesus knowing 
that He was come from God and went to God, riseth 
from supper and laid aside His garments, and took a towel 
and girded Himself." That was the key to all His life ; 
the spring of every action. " Knowing that he came from 
God and went to God," knowing, that is, that God was 
His Father, the source and the satisfaction of His life. 
And that same knowledge which Christ had, you would 
want your friend to have. Does it seem as if no man 
could escape it? Does it seem as if the Divine Father- 



236 A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 

hood were the patent fact of all creation ? As if Nature 
uttered it in all her voices, foi-ever telling us how we 
came out from the centre of all life by the beauty and 
the majesty and the blessing with which she bears wit- 
ness of Him to our hearts ? Does it seem as if those 
hearts themselves, like lost children, claimed their own 
father and would not be satisfied with any other? These 
voices are not fancies. They are real. But the clear fact 
remains that multitudes of men do go through life and 
only in the dimmest tones hear either nature or their own 
hearts claiming God. To such the truth must be uttered 
from some teaching of experience or doctrine. They 
must be told ; we must tell them, by any influence that 
we can bring to bear upon them, that the true end of 
their life is divine. Let us not think that it is only the 
divine Son and the divine Comforter that we have to 
preach. With these men all about us realizing St. Paul's 
description, " Whose end is destruction, whose God is 
their belly," surely we need to preach the divinity of the 
Father ; the divinity of the end of life. The divinity of 
the Father needs assertion first of all. Let men once feel 
it, and then nature and their own hearts will come in 
with their sweet and solemn confirmations of it. But 
nature and the human heart do not teach it of them- 
selves. The truest teaching of it must come from souls 
that are always going in and out before the divine 
Fatherhood themselves. By the sight of such souls others 
must come to seek the satisfaction that comes only from 
a divine end of life, — must come to crave access to the 
Father. So we believe and so we tempt other men to 
believe in God the Father. 

2. This is the divinity of the end. We come from 



A TRINITY -SUNDAY SERMON. 237 

God and we go to God. And now pass to the divinity 
of the method. " Through Jesus Christ." Man is sep- 
arated from God. That fact, testified to by broken as- 
sociations, by alienated affections, by conflicting wills, 
stands written in the whole history of our race. And 
equally clear is it to him who reads the Gospels and en- 
ters into sympathy with their wonderful Person, that in 
Him, in Jesus of Nazareth, appeared the Mediator by 
whom was to be the Atonement. His was the life and 
natui'e which, standing between the Godhood and the 
manhood, was to bridge the gulf and make the firm 
bright road, over which blessing and prayer might pass 
and repass with confident golden feet forever. And then 
the question is, — and when we ask it thus it becomes so 
much more than a dry problem of theology ; it is a ques- 
tion for live anxious men to ask with faces full of eager- 
ness, — out of which nature came that Mediator ? Out 
of which side of the chasm sprang the bridge leaping 
forth towards the other ? Evidently on both sides that 
bridge is bedded deep and clings with a tenacity which 
shows how it belongs there. He is both human and di- 
vine. But from which side did the bridge spring? Who 
moved toward the reconciliation? Was it some towering 
man who, growing beyond his brothers, overlooked the 
battlements of heaven, and saw the place in the divine 
heart where man belonged, and then came back and bade 
his brethren follow him, and led them on with him into 
the home of a father who, reluctant or forgetful, sat 
without effort till his children found their way to him ? 
It is the most precious part of our belief that it was with 
God that the activity began. It is the very soul of the 
Gospel, as I read it, that the Father's heart, sitting above 



238 A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 

US in His holiness, yearned for us as we lay down here 
in our sin. And when there was no man to make an in- 
tercession, He sent His Son to tell us of His love, to live 
with us, to die for us, to lay His life like a strong bridge 
out from the divine side of existence, over which we 
might walk, fearfully but safely, back into the divinity 
where we belonged. Through Him we have access to 
the Father. As the end was divine so the method is di- 
vine. As it is to God that we come, so it is God who 
brings us there. I can think nothing else without dis- 
honoring the tireless, quenchless, love of God. 

Analogies, I know, are very imperfect and often very 
deceptive, when they try to illustrate the highest things. 
But is it not as if a great strong nation, too strong to be 
jealous, strong enough to magnanimously pity and for- 
give, had to deal with a colony of rebels whom it really 
desired to win back again to itself ? They are of its own 
stock, but they have lost their allegiance and are suifer- 
ing the sorrows and privations of being cut off from their 
fatherland and living in rebellion. That fatherland 
might send its embassy to tempt them home ; and, if it 
did, whom would it choose to send ? Would it not take 
of itself its messenger ? The embassy that is sent is of 
the country that sends it. That is its value, that is its 
influence. The fatherland would choose its choicest son, 
taking him from nearest to its heart, and say. Go and 
show them what I am, how loving and how ready to for- 
give, for you are I and you can show them. Such was 
the mission of the Messiah. Do you not remember His 
own parable ? One day He told His hearers in the old 
temple how the master of the vineyard sent out his ser- 
vants one after another to his rebellious husbandmen, but 



A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 239 

last of all he sent unto them his son. What was the dif- 
ference? It was Himself that He sent then. The am- 
bassador was of the very land that sent Him, " God of 
God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not 
made, being of one substance with the Father." How 
full the words of the old creed are of rich meaning. How 
the heat of the hot controversy in which they were born 
has passed out of them, and they are deep and clear and 
cool as wells that draw their water of refreshment from 
the unheated centre of the eternal rock. My friend says 
God sends Christ into the world and therefoi-e Christ is 
not God. I cannot see it so. It seems to me just other- 
wise. God sends Christ just because Christ is God. He 
sends Himself. His sending is a coming. The ambas- 
sador, the army is of the very most precious substance of 
the country that dispatches it. This is the meaning of 
that constant title of our Master. He is the Son of God. 
Think of it. Does not " Son " mean just this which the 
church's faith, with the best words that it could find, has 
labored to express, " Two persons and one substance." 
That is the Father and the Child. Separate personality 
but one nature. Unity and distinctness both, but the 
unity as true a fact as the distinctness. Nay, the unity 
the fact which made the essence of His mission, the fact 
which made Him the true, fit, only perfect messenger of 
God and Saviour of the world. 

This is the glory of the Incarnation. That embassy 
out of the fatherUmd comes to the rebel colony and lives 
there. It enters into the rude huts which the degenerate 
colonists have built, and makes itself a home in them. It 
is a stranger there, and yet the men of whom it is com- 
posed find in these half-savage huts memories of the com- 



240 A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 

nion home from which these colonists as well as they came 
forth at first. They are not wholly strangers. Some- 
thing about the shape of the huts reminds them of the 
palaces at home, and here and there an iron instrument 
with blunted edge, or a household utensil put to some un- 
seemly use, makes them remember that these rebels they 
have come to reconcile are originally brethren of theirs. 
And so the Mediator came to us, and every day of all the 
life in Palestine bore witness both to the strangeness and 
to the familiarness with which He lived among us. The 
events and habits of the Saviour's career on earth seem 
like the huts of savagedom inhabited by the children of 
civilization. And so it is with the presence of Christ 
always. His unseen presence in the institutions of the 
world and in the hearts of men. He is always glorify- 
ing them and shaming them at once, showing at once 
their natural capacity and their degenerate condition. It 
does seem to me that the great beauty of the old belief 
in the divinity of Christ is the faith in the capacity of 
manhood which it implies. It believes that man is of so 
godlike a nature that he can hold God, that God can be 
incarnated in him. Our sense of man's capacity is low. 
We do not think that God could dwell in the temple of 
a life like ours. But was not that just what He came to 
teach us that He could do ? He teaches it to us by the 
rich experience of His Spirit dwelling in our spirits, but 
before that He taught it to us by the Word made flesh. 
A brute race could have seen no incarnation. God could 
care for them and feed them, but He could not come into 
them, live in them. But man is better. " Because we 
are sons, God has sent the spirit of His Son into our 
hearts." Because we are sons. His Son Himself could 



A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 241 

take our nature upon Him. The more truly we belieye 
in the Incarnate Deity, the more devoutly we must be- 
lieve in the essential glory of humanity, the more ear- 
nestly we must struggle to keep the purity and integrity 
and largeness of our own human life, and to help our 
brethren to keep theirs. It is because the divine can 
dwell in us that we may have access to divinity. We 
and they must, through the divine method, come to the 
divine end where we belong, through God the Son to God 
the Father. 

3. And now turn to the point that still remains. We 
have spoken of the end and of the method ; but no true 
act is perfect unless the power by which it works is wor- 
thy of the method through which and the end to which 
it proceeds. The power of the act of man's salvation 
is the Holy Spirit. " Through Christ Jesus we all have 
access by one Spirit unto the Father." What do we 
mean by the Holy Spirit being the power of salvation ? 
I think we are often deluded and misled by carrying out 
too far some of the figurative forms in which the Bible 
and the I'eligious experience of men express the saving of 
the soul. For instance, salvation is described as the lift- 
ing of the soul out of a pit and putting it upon a pinnacle, 
or on a safe high platform of grace. The figure is strong 
and clear. Nothing can overstate the utter dependence 
of the soul on God for its deliverance ; but if we let the 
figure leave in our minds an impression of the human 
soul as a dead, passive thing, to be lifted from one place 
to the other like a torpid log that makes no effort of its 
own either for cooperation or resistance, then the figure 
has misled us. The soul is a live thing. Everything 
that is done with it must be done in and through its own 

16 



242 A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERJION. 

essential life. If a soul is saved, it must be by the salva- 
tion, the sanctification of its essential life ; if a soul is lost, 
it must be by perdition of its life, by the degradation of 
its affections and desires and hopes. Let there be noth- 
ing merely mechanical in the conception of the way God 
treats these souls of ours. He works upon them in the 
vitality of thought, passion, and will that He put into 
them. And so when a soul comes to the Father through 
the Saviour, its whole essential vitalitv moves in the act. 
With those affections with which it has loved the world, 
it loves its Lord. With that same will with which it 
chose iniquity, it chooses now holiness and heaven. The 
whole capacity of life was there. Now the power of Life 
has entered in and is using it. And just this sometimes 
hides from us the essentially divine chai'acter of the new 
spiritual life. It seems as if the Christian had simply 
chosen to love God instead of loving his business ; but as 
he goes on and finds what this new love of God really 
means, he finds what it is that has happened. He under- 
stands what is the nature of the change, though its in- 
finiteness enlarges to Him every day. The capacities of 
faith and love and holiness have been taken possession 
of and filled out to their completeness by the very Spirit 
of holiness and love and faith which they were made to 
hold, but which is greater than themselves. The divine 
power has taken possession of the soul's capacities, and, 
although it may seem at first as if the soul itself had 
originated this new movement to God through Christ, 
just as it may seem to the child at first as if his body did 
all these spiritual acts which the spirit does within it, 
yet, by and by, the conviction clears itself, and grows 
clearer and clearer constantly, that it is not the soul's 



• 



A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 243 

simple ability to be religious that has niade it religious ; 
but that God by direct visitation has occupied that abil- 
ity and is drawing the soul, to Himself ; just as the child 
comes to distinguish between the bodj^'s mere ability to 
answer the mind's requirements, and the mind itself 
which uses the body as the servant of its needs. 

When this experience is reached, then see what God- 
hood the soul has come to recognize in the world. First, 
there is the Creative Deity from which it sprang, and to 
which it is struggling to return — the divine End, God 
the Father. Then there is the Incarnate Deity, which 
makes that return possible by the exhibition of God's 
love, — the divine method, God the Son ; and then there 
is this Infused Deity, this divine energy in the soul itself, 
taking its capacities and setting them homeward to the 
Father — the divine Power of Salvation, God the Holy 
Spirit. To the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. 
If we recur a moment to the figure which we used a 
while ago ; God is the divine Fatherland of the human 
soul ; Christ is like the embassy, part and parcel of 
that Fatherland, which comes out to win it back from 
its rebellion ; and the Holy Spirit is the Fatherland 
wakened in the rebellious colony's own soul. He is the 
newly-living loyalty. When the colony comes back, the 
power that brings it is the Fatherland in it seeking its 
own. So when the soul comes back to God, it is God in 
the soul tliat brings it. So we believe in the divine 
power, one with the divine method and the divine end, 
in God the Spirit one with the Father and the Son. 

This appears to me the truth of the Deity as it relates 
to us. I say again, " as it relates to us." What it may 
be in itself ; how Father, Son, and Spirit meet in the 



244 A TRINITY -SUNDAY SERMON. 

perfect Godhood ; what infinite truth more there may, 
there must, be in that Godhood, no man can dare to 
guess. But, to us, God is the end, the method, and 
the power of salvation ; so He is Father, Son, and Holy 
Spirit. It is in the perfect harmony of these sacred per- 
sonalities that the precious unit}' of the Deity consists. 
I look at the theologies, and so often it seems as if the 
harmony of Father, Son, and Spirit had been lost, both 
by those that own and by those that disown the Trinity. 
One theology makes the Father hard and cruel, longing, 
as it were, for man's punishment, extorting from the Son 
the last drop of life-blood which man's sin had incurred 
as penalty. Another theology makes the Son merely 
one of the multitude of sinning men, with somewhat 
bolder aspirations laying hold on a forgiveness which 
God might give but which no mortal might assume. 
Still another theology can find no God in the human 
heart at all ; merely a fermentation of human nature is 
this desire after goodness, this reaching out towards Di- 
vinity. The end is not worthy of the method. I do not 
want to come to such a Father as some of the theologians 
have painted. Or the method is not worthy of the end. 
No man could come to the perfect God through such a 
Jesus as some men have described. Or the power is too 
weak for both ; and all that Christ has done lies useless, 
and all the Father's welcome waits in vain for the soul 
that has in it no Holy Ghost. But let each be real, and 
each be worthy of the others, and the salvation is com- 
plete. But each cannot be worthy of the others unless 
each is perfect. But each cannot be perfect, unless each 
is Divine ; that is our faith in the Trinity, — three Per- 
sons and one God. 



A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 245 

We talk here to-day about the doctrine of the Trinity, 
our best conception and account of God. But does it not 
sometimes come over our minds, What shall we think of 
all this when we come into that world where we shall 
see God with unclouded vision, standing close to His 
mercy-seat and to His throne? Shall we still hold our 
doctrine of the Trinity ? Will these formulas in which 
we have glibly argued to one another about God, as we 
talked in our churches and our parlors here, will they 
suffice to express that majesty and love which then shall 
pour in on the open soul conclusive witness of itself? 
Surely we must not hope it. Surely our formulas will 
burst, and prove too small and thin for that stupendous 
self-revelation of the Deity. We shall see, I believe, that 
our statements here were to the knowledge that will flood 
our eager apprehension there only what the child's crude 
knowledge of his father is to the full-grown son's com- 
prehension of the generous and thoughtful nature under 
whose shadow and in whose liglit he lives. But just as 
the son, much as he learns about his father, never out- 
grows, however he may refine and enlarge, his first con- 
ception of the essential qualities of the parental life, its 
truth and love and justice, so to the soul in heaven, 
learnino; more and more forever of the God of its salva- 
tion, tliis shall become clearer and clearer always : that 
it was saved by a divine power, through a divine method, 
to a divine end ; into the heart of the Father, through 
the brotherhood of the Son, urged by the inspiring Spirit. 
That will be the everlasting salvation, real to the soul 
forever, whatever else may change. That will be the 
reality by which we shall know that the glory we have 
reached is the same for which we longed and prayed 



246 A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. 

and struggled when we were on the earth, in these dear 
old days to which we shall look back with undying affec- 
tion from eternity. 

Let us keep the faith of the Trinity. I have spoken 
all in vain to-day, unless you know now that I do not 
mean by such an exhortation, " Let us cling to an idea, 
and die for the holding to a precious word." Let us do 
that, if need be ; but far above that, let us seek to come 
to the highest, through the highest, by the highest. Let 
the end and the method and the power of our life be 
all divine. If our hearts are set on that, Jesus will ac- 
cept us for His disciples ; all that He promised to do for 
those who trusted Him, He will do for us. He will show 
us the Father ; He will send us the Comforter ; nay, 
what can He do, or what can we ask that will outgo the 
strong and sweet assurance of the promise which we have 
been studying to-day : Through Him we shall have ac- 
cess by one Spirit unto the Father. 



XIV. 

IS IT I ? 

" And as they did eat, Jesus said, Verily I say unto you, that one of 3 ou 
shall betray me. And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every 
one of tliem to say unto Him, Lord, is it 1 1 " — Matt. xxvi. 21, 22. 

It was a moment of dismay among the disciples of 
Jesus. Their Master, sitting with them at the supper, 
had just declared that one of them should commit an act 
of the basest treachery and betray Him to His enemies. 
There could be no deed more contemptible. Every ob- 
ligation of duty and affection was violated by it. One 
who stood by, in the rude upper chamber where they ate 
the supper, might well have watched with curiosity to 
see how these plain men would take the words of Jesus. 
Will they break out in indignant remonstrance ? Will 
they fall to accusing one another ? Will each draw back 
from his brother apostle in horror at the thought that 
possibly that brother apostle is the man who is to do 
this dreadful thing ? Instead of these, there is a differ- 
ent result from either, and one that certainly surprises 
us. Each man's anxiety seems to be turned, not towards 
his brother, but towards himself, and you hear them ask- 
ing, one after another, " Lord, is it I ? " " Lord, is it 
I?" Peter, Bartholomew, John, James, Thomas, each 
speaks for himself, and the quick questions come pouring 
in out of their simple hearts, " Lord, is it I ? " " Lord, 
isiti?" 



248 IS IT I? 

Certainly there is something that is strange in this. 
These men were genuine. There could not be any af- 
fectation in their question. A real live fear came over 
them at Jesus's prophecy. And it was a good sign, no 
doubt, that the first thought of each of them was about 
the possibility of his own sin. When a man foresees a 
great temptation that is coming, it is always better that, 
instead of turning to his neighbors and saying, as he 
searches their faces, " I wonder who will do this wicked 
thing," he should turn to himself and say, " Is it possi- 
ble that I am the man who will do it ? " When the 
wind is rising it is good for each ship at sea to look to 
its own ropes and sails, and not stand gazing to see how 
ready the other ships are to meet it. We all feel that 
we would rather hear a man asking about himself anx- 
iously than to see him so sure of himself that the ques- 
tion never occurred to him. We should be surer of his 
standing firm if we saw that he knew he was in danger 
of a fall. Now, all this is illustrated in Christ's disci- 
ples. It must have been that their life with Him had 
deepened the sense of the mystery of their lives. They 
had seen themselves, in their intercourse with Him, as 
capable of much more profound and various spiritual ex- 
perience than they had thought possible before. And 
this possible life, this possible experience, had run in 
both directions, up and down. They had recognized a 
before unknown capacity for holiness, and they had seen 
also a before unknown power of wickedness. Their slug- 
gishness had been broken up, and they had seen that 
they were capable of divine things. Their self-satisfied 
pride had been broken up, and they had seen that they 
were capable of brutal things. Heaven and hell had 



IS IT I? 249 

opened above their heads and under their feet. They 
had not thought it incredible when Chi-ist said, " I go 
to prepare a place for you, and I will come again and 
receive you to myself," and now they did not think it 
incredible when He said, " One of you shall betray me." 
The life with Christ had melted the ice in which they 
had been frozen, and they felt it in them either to rise 
to the sky or to sink into the depths. That was and that 
always is Christ's revelation of the possibilities of life. 
To one who really lives with Him the heights above 
and the depths below both grow more profound. A new 
goodness and a new badness become possible. He makes 
men know that they are the children of God, and that 
as God's children they have a chance to be far better or 
far worse than they could be when they thought them- 
selves only His slaves. All this Christ did for those first 
disciples and the same change of life, the same deepen- 
ing of its possibilities, has come to all who have really 
lived with Him since then. 

There are times in the lives of all of us, I think, when 
that comes to us which came here to Christ's disciples. 
Of such times and their position in our lives and their 
effect upon our lives let us speak this morning. Be- 
neath us as beneath them the worse possibilities of our 
nature sometimes reveal themselves. There are times 
when it seems to us not impossible that we should com- 
mit very great sins. Just as there are some times when 
we catch si"ght of the possibility of holiness which lies 
above us, and com pi-ehend with rapturous hope how good 
it is in our power to become; so there are these other 
times wlien the mysteriousness of our nature opens its 
other side, and the crimes and vices, at which we and 



250 IS IT I? 

all men tremble, seem to be not wholly impossible to us. 
Such times are not our worst times certainly. Often 
they are times which, by their very sense of danger, are 
the safest and strongest of our lives. But they are often 
moments that dismay us. They come in upon our self- 
complacency and shock it with their ominous presence, 
these moments when we suspect ourselves and see that 
inevitably to the power of being very good if we will, is 
linked the other power of being very bad if we will, too. 
Let us consider what some of the times are which waken 
this darker self-consciousness, this sense of our own pos- 
sibilities of sin. 

One of them is the time when we see deep and fla- 
grant sin in some other man. When some great crime is 
done, when through the community there runs the story 
of some frightful cruelty, or dreadful fraud, I think that 
almost all of us are conscious of a strange mixture of 
two emotions, one of horror and the other of a terrible 
familiarity. The act is repugnant to all our conscien- 
tiousness, but the powers that did the act, and the mo- 
tives that persuaded the doing of it, are powers which we 
possess and motives which we have felt. They are hu- 
man powers and human motives. It is a human act. If 
we could watch the sinning of another race with a wholly 
different nature, I think that it would stir no such self- 
consciousness. If we could stand by and see the wicked- 
ness of fiends or fallen angels, it might excite our hatred, 
our disgust, but it would make no such de6p question- 
ings as come when we recognize our own humanity in 
the sinning man, and find our nature bearing witness 
that it has in it the same powers by which he has been 
80 wicked. A being of a higher race might see our sin 



IS IT I? 251 

and sorrow with pity, with pain, with wonder ; but the 
pain would be all free from self-reproach, and the wonder 
would all exhaust itself outside of him. It would be the 
innocent bewilderment with which I remember, in a pict- 
ure by Domenichino at Bologna, an angel stands at the 
foot of the empty cross, and tries with his finger one 
of the sharp points in the crown of thorns which the 
Saviour had worn during His passion. It is all a sad in- 
explicable wonder to him. It appeals to no experience 
of wickedness and woe in his pure and angelic nature. 
But when you or I take the crown of thorns into our 
hands we know in our own hearts the meanness, the jeal- 
ousy, the hatred which it represents. The possible Jew, 
the possible enemy of righteousness and crucifier of the 
Saviour, stirs to self-consciousness in us. When you read 
the story of yesterday's defaulter fleeing to-day, an exile 
and an outcast, or sitting gloomily behind his prison 
bars, it is not with an angel's innocent wonder what a sin 
like his can mean ; it is with the understanding of a man 
who has felt the same temptation to which this poor 
wretch has yielded, that you deplore his fate. It is al- 
ways the difference between an angel's pity and a man's 
pity. With simple wonder an angel might walk through 
our State Prison halls ; but a man must walk there full 
of humbleness and charity ; for, as the best man that 
ever lived finds something of common humanity in us 
which makes his goodness seem not impossible to us, 
so the worst of men stirs by the sight of his human sin 
some sense of what human power of sinfulness we too 
possess. 

2. Another of the occasions which lets us see our own 
possibility of sin, which opens to us a glimpse of how 



252 IS IT I? 

wicked we might be, is when we do some small sin and 
recognize the deep power of sinfulness by which we do 
it. The Bible is full of this idea. Look at Adam with 
the forbidden apple. Is it only that one sin which terri- 
_fies him, and makes him dread the coming of God which 
had been once the joy of the garden day ? Is it not that 
pressing up behind that sin he sees the long procession 
of sins which he and his descendants will commit ? A 
boy paints his first stumbling, ill-drawn picture, and, as 
he gazes at it, he sees, already, the glowing canvas which 
he is some day to cover. It grows possible to him. A 
boy makes his first boyish bargain, and the trade-im- 
pulse rises in him, and, already, he sees himself a mer- 
chant. It is the same thing. A pure, honest boy cheats 
with his first little timid fraud, and on the other side, the 
bad side of him, the door flies open and he sees the possi- 
bility that he, too, should be the swindler whose enor- 
mous frauds make the whole city tremble. The slightest 
crumbling of the earth under your feet makes you aware 
of the precipice. The least impurity makes you ready to 
cry out, as some image of hideous lust rises before you, 
" Oh, is it I ? Can I come to that ? " 

3. And yet another occasion when we become aware 
of our own bad possibility is the expression of any sus- 
picion about us by another person. Perfectly unwar- 
rantable and false we may knovr the charge to be which 
is brought against us, but the mere fastening of the sin 
and our name together, the fact that any man could men- 
tion the two in the same breath, must turn our eyes in 
upon ourselves and set us to asking, " Is it impossible ?" 
" I did not do this thing indeed. My conscience is all 
clear. I did not commit this cruelty. I did not prove 



IS IT I? 253 

so ungrateful and treacherous as this charge would make 
me. Perhaps I could not, perhaps I know I could not do 
this special villainy. But can I blaze up into fiery indig- 
nation at men's daring to suspect me without remember- 
ing what badness I am capable of. Can I resent suspi- 
cion as an angel might, who, standing in the light of God, 
dreaded and felt no sin ? " I think that for you or me to 
find our names linked to-morrow in this community with 
some great crime, of which we knew that we were to- 
tally innocent, must stir the mystery of our inner life, and 
make us see what capacity of sin is lying there. I think 
our disavowal of the sin that we were charged with 
would be not boisterously angry, but quiet and solemn 
and humble, with a sense of danger and a gratitude for 
preservation. I think that ought to be the influence. 
And even the boisterousness with which some men deny 
a charge against their characters is still a sign in a worse 
way of how their conscience has been touched. Would 
you want the clerk in your store to be charged with dis- 
honesty, and not go back to his work, when the charge 
had been disproved, with a deepened perception of temp- 
tation, and a quickened watchfulness and care ? 

4. Or yet again. By a strange but very natural proc- 
ess, the same result often comes from just the opposite 
cause. Not merely when men suspect us and charge us 
with wrong doing, but when men praise us and say that 
we are good, this same recognition of how bad we have 
the power to be often arises. Suppose that you are going 
on in a dull and lifeless wa}^, not conscious of anything 
about yourself except just the practical powers by which 
you do your work from day to day. You have forgotten 
the mystery of your spiritual life. You have grown 



254 IS IT I? 

wholly unaware of the moral extremes whose folded capac- 
ities are in you. You never think how wicked you may 
be, or how good you may be. " Take thine ease, eat, 
drink, and be merry." You have come to that. And 
then suppose that some fellow-being, under the influence 
of some delusion, begins to praise you. He takes some 
little thing which you have done ; he conceives for it 
lofty motives which you never dreanjed of : he purifies 
it of all selfishness ; he holds it up and says, " See what 
a true deep spiritual man it must have been that did this 
thing." What is in your heart as you see your poor 
little deed held up above the world, shining with the light 
that this friend's imagination has thrown into it, and 
with the eyes of all men fastened upon it? Is there no 
shame ? You must be a very poor sort of man if there 
is not. Is there no breaking up of the dead equilibrium 
of self-content ? Is it not as if the net in which a bird 
had been held, with its wings helpless and useless, were 
torn to pieces, and the bird had either to fall to the 
ground or to fly to the sky. Its danger and its chance 
were revealed to it together. A man comes up to our 
life and looking round upon the crowd of our fellow-men, 
he says, " See, I will strike the life of this brother of ours 
and you shall hear how true it rings." He does strike 
it, and it does seem to them to ring true, and they shout 
their applause ; but we whose life is struck feel running 
all through us at the stroke the sense of hollowness. Our 
soul sinks as we hear the praises. They start desire but 
they reveal weakness. No true man is ever so humble* 
and so afraid of himself as when other men are praising 
him most loudly. 

5. I must name one time more. Is it not true that 



IS IT I? 255 

every temptation which comes to us, however bravely 
and successfully it may be resisted, opens to us the sight 
of some of our human capacity of sin. To resist temp- 
tation is never, I think, an exhilarating experience. We 
remember too vividly how near we came to yielding. We 
come out of battle thankful that we are safe and sound, 
but the night after the battle is not a light-hearted or 
jovial time. There are too many vacant places in the 
tent which only yesterday were full. The shriek of the 
bullet and the sight of the bursting shell are still too 
fresh and vivid. We are too much surprised to find that 
we are safe. Our escape has been too narrow. Job, as 
his wealth rolls back to him, takes it with thankful hands, 
but he cannot laugh over it when he remembers how 
from the heights of his misery he looked over into the 
possibility of cursing God. Simeon, when the child 
Christ is brought to him, thanks God that he has lived 
to see the fulfilment of his hopes ; but he may well have 
remembered how often he had been almost ready to de- 
spair and give up his long watch. Nay, even Jesus Him- 
self, what shall we think was the kind of step with which 
He came down the mountain ? He had seen Satan. He 
had seen with what gi-eedy and confident eyes Satan 
looked at that humanity of his, as if it were something 
that belonged to Him. Nay, in His own humanity He 
had felt a treacherous something, that was ready to re- 
spond to Satan and to own his mastery. Strong and vic- 
torious He came away. But was there no new solemn 
insight into this humanity which He had taken ? Was 
not the Incarnation more than ever awful to the Incar- 
nate One ? He, the sinless, had gone up and looked over 
the edge into the deepest depths of sin. He needed the 



256 IS IT I? 

ministry of angels, and He surely came down the moun- 
tain serious and sad. And so it is with you, when you 
follow your Lord into that experience. It may be that 
3'ou come out by His grace pure and thankful, but you 
come out like Him, serious and sad, for you have looked 
down as He looked into the possibility of sin. The man 
who dares to laugh at a temptation which he has felt and 
resisted is not yet wholly safe out of its power. 

I name these times then in which the possibility of our 
own great wickedness appears to us. No doubt the list 
might be made longer, but these are enough. When 
other men sin flagrantly ; when we sin in any degree ; 
when men suspect us although we are innocent ; when 
men praise us ; when we are tempted and resist, — at all 
those times the ground opens under our feet, and, though 
we stand safe and firm, we see whither we might have 
fallen. What is this but saying that in every serious 
moment of life the possibility of sin stands up before us? 
None but the man who has no serious moments, none but 
he who makes all life a play, escapes the sight. To every 
other man, nay, may w^e not say to every man, since no 
man is literally always a trifler, to every man at some time 
the clouds roll back, the spell is broken, and he sees what 
a power of being wicked as of being good belongs to him 
just as man. And now is it good for him to see this? 
Will it help him or harm him ? Perhaps it is a question 
that is needless. He cannot help himself. He must see it. 
When it has once opened on him, he cannot shut his eyes 
and forget it if he would. He will see it still behind his 
folded lids. But still we may ask the question, Will it 
help or harm him? And that will depend upon the way 
it works in him. It may become in him either paralysis 



IS IT I? 25 



Z0( 



or inspiration. One man sees his danger and stands 
powerless. Another man sees his danger and every 
faculty is strung to its intensest strength. It is like the 
way in which the knowledge of the shortness of life may 
affect a man. One man it fills with dismay ; another 
man it turns into a hero. What you want in both cases 
is to realize the conviction as a motive, and not as a mere 
emotion. I remember reading of how some one once 
asked a veteran surgeon what was the effect of the con- 
stant sight of human pain which filled his life, — how he 
could bear it. And his answer was wise and philosoph- 
ical. He said that, as near as he could state it, the sight 
of pain ceased with the surgeon to act as a source of emo- 
tion, but continued to be effective as a motive for action. 
The miser}'^ at seeing it passed away, but the desire to re- 
lieve it grew stronger and stronger. So I think it is with 
the best sense of our danger of sin. Not as an emotion, 
not as something that we sit down and weep over, but as 
a motive, as something that makes us watch and work 
and pray, does it do its best work for us. The knees 
need not tremble, nor the heart grow sick. If the feet 
are set more resolutely toward goodness, and the hands 
lay hold more firmly upon help, it is good for us to know 
how wicked we may be, how great our danger is. 

And what is it that makes that difference ? How is 
the consciousness of our danger prevented from becoming 
a depressing emotion and turned into an inspiring motive? 
It must be by opening the life upon the other side. It 
must be by realizing the possibilities of our human life 
for good as well as for evil, by seeing and never forget- 
ting how good we have a chance to be, as well as how bad 
we may become. This is the power of hope; and hope 

17 



258 IS IT I? 

is the true master of fear. Hope uses fear. It demands 
its service by a natural right. It is fear's essential supe- 
rior. Under hope fear works well. But in a life that 
has no hope fear is a surly tyrant. Now our human nat- 
ure cannot bear being shut up in its present condition. 
No man's nature can. Your nature feels its own myste- 
rious capacities too much to believe for a moment that 
it can be nothing different from what it is. It crowds 
and presses for an outlet. If it can find an outlet only 
on the lower side, toward its possibility of sinfulness, it 
will go forth there and contemplate the evil that lies 
within its power until it grows into stony hopelessness. 
But if it finds an opening on the upper side of its present 
condition, it prefers that, and going out there, aspiring 
instead of despairing, it is simply driven on toward that 
which it is already seeking, by the knowledge of what lies 
behind it if by any chance it should fall back. This is 
always the relation between hope and fear in healthy 
life. A merchant hopes to be rich, and the fear of be- 
ing poor, instead of being a vexing anxiety, becomes 
the humble servant of his expectation, and helps him on 
toward wealth. The fear of death is terrible to a sick 
man until the hope of life and strength and activity 
opens before him ; and then inrhis convalescence the fear 
of death has ceased to depress him as a feeling, and only 
remains with him as a motive to caution and watchful- 
ness. Thus fear is always good when it has hope to rule 
it. And now if you saw a young man overwhelmed with 
the sight on which our eyes have been fixed to-day ; if 
you saw him so full of the consciousness of the power of 
sill in his life, the possibility of the badness that he 
might do and be, that he was wretched and paralyzed. 



IS IT I? 259 

wliat would you do for liim. Would you try to make 
him forget what he had seen ? Would you try to shut 
out the mystery of his life from him, and make him live 
again the life of narrow satisfaction in the present which 
he lived before he looked down into the deep gulf ? You 
could not do it; but if you could would it be well? 
Surely not. What you need to do for him is to make 
him lift up his eyes and see the heights above him. You 
want to make him like the climber on a ladder, who looks 
up and not down, who climbs not to escape the gulf be- 
low him, but to reach the top above him, and who feels 
the gulf below him only as a power that makes the hold 
of foot and hand on every round of the ladder which they 
strike more firm. Now it is the glory of the Christian 
Gospel that in the treatment of man's spiritual nature it 
preserves this true relation between hope and fear per- 
fectly. Christ is the very embodiment of what I have 
just now been saying. Read your New Testament. As 
the man who feels its influence leaves his sin and strives 
towards holiness, what is the power of his progress ? Is 
it the fear of what he leaves behind ? Is it not always 
primarily the desire for the holiness he seeks? And yet 
the saved of the Saviour as He is borne onward into His 
salvation never can lose the sense of the great deep below 
him, into which he must fall if he lets the Saviour go. 
But that sense only tightens more closely the grasp of 
the hands which have first seized the hope that was set 
before them out of ardent desire. This, I am sure, is 
always the proportion of the Gospel. " Flee from the 
wratli to come " is always an ally and humble servant of 
the great " Come unto me." " Come unto me " might 
stand alone, even if there were no " Flee from the wrath 



260 IS IT I? 

to come." But wh;it would " Flee from the wrath to 
come " be without " Come unto me " ? One is almost 
ready to say : Better lose sight of the mysterious ca- 
pacity of life altogether, than to see only one side of it. 
Hide your eyes. Forget that you are a sinner ; never 
dare look down and see what a sinner you may be, if 
there is no Saviour from your sin. But if there is, and if 
you see Him, then feel the depth below you and let it 
make you cling to Him more closely ; realize the power of 
sinfulness, which has in it the cruelty and falseness and 
impurity of the worst men that have lived, that you may 
realize also the power of holiness which has in it the 
truth and bravery and gentleness of all the saints ; let 
the gulf under your feet measure for you the sky over- 
head. Know what a sinner you might have been only 
that you may know more deeply and gratefully the sal- 
vation which has saved you. 

I suggested just now the analogy between our physical 
and moral consciousness, between our consciousness of the 
power to be sick and the consciousness of the power to 
sin. It is an analogy which illustrates what I have just 
been saying. There is a nervousness about health which 
is all morbid. It is full of imaginations. There are peo- 
ple who can never hear a disease described without think- 
ing that they have it. They never hear a sick man talk 
without feeling all his symptoms repeated in themselves. 
You think of such a person and realize his wretchedness. 
Then you look away from him to a perfectly healthy 
man who seldom thinks about being sick at all. But 
yet he is something different from what he would be if 
there were no power of sickness in him. Unconscious for 
the most part, but now and then coming forth into con- 



IS IT I? 261 

sciousness, there is always present with him a sense of 
his humanity with all the liabilities which that involves. 
He does not do what a man would do who had literally 
a frame of iron. And that is just the condition of the 
man with the healthy soul. He does not nervously be- 
lieve, when he hears of any flagrant crime, that he is just 
upon the brink of that crime himself. He lives in doing 
righteousness, but all the time he keeps the consciousness 
that sin, even out to its worst possibilities, sin even to the 
cruelty of Cain, the lust of David, the treachery of Judas, 
is open to him. This consciousness surrounds all his 
duty. His righteousness is not an angel's righteousness. 
It is always a man's righteousness, always pervaded, 
solemnized, strengthened, ay, sweetened to him by the 
knowledge that there is a bad corresponding to every 
good, and that he might do one instead of the other just 
because he is a man. 

I do not care to go one step into the theological mys- 
teries of compelling grace and final perseverance. I do 
not care to ask whether it is possible for man, still being 
man, to come to such a point that this of which I have 
spoken to-day, this possibility of flagrant and terrible 
sin, should utterly and absolutely be left behind and pass 
away. I think that what I have been saying lately shows 
us that a man, as the power of the hope of holiness takes 
stronger and stronger hold upon him, does pass more and 
more out of the fear of sin. And since his hope of holi- 
ness always comes to him as the gift of God, and depends 
on his dependence on God, we can see that as man by ex- 
perience grows sure of God, and morally certain that he 
never can be separated from Him, lie passes to a profound 
belief that he will not fall into the flagrant sin, which 



262 IS IT I? 

yet, because he is a man, remains possible for him. This 
moral certainty of his comes from his confidence in God. 
It is not confidence in himself. Here it seems to me is 
the true escape from whatever has seemed harsh or hope- 
less in the truth which I have preached to you to-day. 
The disciples heard Jesus tell of the coming treason, and 
each of them thought with horror that he might be the 
traitor. " Lord, is it I?" and " Is it I?" they cried. 
They knew that they loved their Lord, but they dared 
not be sure that they would not desert Him. Sufficient 
spiritual light had come to them to make them see the 
mysteiy of their own hearts. Once, before they had this 
spiritual light, they would have cast aside such a sus- 
picion as an insult. " Am I not an honorable man ? " 
" Is not such a mean act impossible for me ? " Now 
Christ in showing them their higher chance has shown 
them their lower chance, their danger too, and each won- 
ders whether it can be he who is to do this dreadful 
thing. Now open a later page of the apostolic history 
and hear St. Paul writing to his Romans : " Who shall 
separate us from the love of Christ ? Shall tribulation, or 
distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, 
or the sword ? Nay, in all these things we are more 
than conquerors through Him who loved us." See what 
a change. Here is confidence ! Here is a moral cer- 
tainty ! Whoever else may turn traitor, Paul is sure that 
it will not be he. But it is confidence — not in himself 
nor in his manliness or honor — only in Christ and in the 
power of His grace and love. " More than conqueror," 
but " more than conqueror through Him who loved us." 
Is there not here the beautiful progress of a moral nature 
as regards the whole matter of confidence ? At the first a 



IS IT 1? 263 

pure blank self-reliance, the solid and unbroken self-con- 
tent of a man who thinks himself able to meet and con- 
quer all temptations. Then an insight into the mysteri- 
ous capacity of sinning, which breaks and scatters the 
confidence in self, and leaves the poor soul full of fears 
and doubts. Then an entrance into Christ and His love 
and power, where the soul, given to Him, finds a new 
confidence in His strength, and is sure with a sureness 
which has no warrant but its trust in Him, Have you 
ever watched one of the waterfalls that come over the 
perpendicular side of a steep mountain ? Do you remem- 
ber how it changes from the top to the bottom of its 
fall. At first w^here it comes over the brink it is one 
solid mass of dark-green water, compact and all sure of 
itself. Then half-way down the perpendicular face over 
which it descends, see what a change has come. Its sol- 
idness has gone. It is all mist and vapor. You can 
hardly find it. Only like a thin haze it hangs in front 
of the dark rock behind it. But once more, as it gets 
farther down, see how it gathers again. The mist col- 
lects, and is once more a stream ; a new solidity appears ; 
and at the mountain's foot the brook, restored out of its 
distraction, starts singing on its way down the bright 
valley, white still with the memory of the confusion into 
which it has been thrown. So is it with the confidence 
of man. It begins full of self-trust. It scatters and 
seems lost as his experience deepens and he learns his 
own possibility of sin. It is gathered anew and goes out 
in happiness and helpfulness when he finds Christ and 
gives his poor bewildered and endangered soul into His 
love for keeping. 

This is the Bible picture of human life. Where shall 



264 IS IT I? 

we look for any other that is as reasonable or as com- 
plete ? The fearless truster of liimself ; the distressed 
doubter of himself ; the faithful truster of Christ ! 
They are all here. We lay the Bible picture down be- 
side our human life and it explains everything. In life, 
too, there is the stout believer in himself, the frightened 
disbeliever in himself, and the sure believer in God. As 
a man comes into Christ, that experience deepens itself 
around him till he has fulfilled it all. First, a stripping 
away of his own righteousness, and then a clothing with 
the righteousness which is in Jesus. First, a light thrown 
upon himself, till it seems as if there were no wickedness 
he might not do, and then a drawing of his self into 
Christ's self till he sees there is no holiness which he 
may not attain. First, the weakness which comes of self- 
knowledge, and then the strength which is " strong in the 
Lord and in the power of His might." First, the fear 
which cries, "Is it I?" as it hears the announcement of 
some dreadful sin ; and then the wondering faith which 
cries, " Is it I ? " as the doors are opened and they who 
are Christ's are called to enter in to His everlasting life. 



XV. 

THE FOOD OF MAN. 

"It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone." — Matt. iv. 4. 

Christ, at the very opening of His work, met the evil 
spirit in the desert and contended with him. The words 
which I have just quoted are the answer of the Saviour 
to one of the attacks of Satan. The tempter said, " If 
Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be 
made bread." And Jesus answered, "It is written, Man 
shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that 
proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Such an answer 
must have peculiar force and meaning, as it comes from 
the lips of Christ. He tells Satan that obedience to God 
is better than bread ; that if either is to be given up 
there cannot be a doubt, there can hardly be a difficulty, 
about the decision. With one of these two things which 
He compares together, He had been eternally familiar. 
The word, the will of God, He had known forever. He 
had obeyed God in the complete unity of nature which 
,He had with God. We can remember how touchingly 
His mind ran back a few years later, when He was just 
upon the brink of His great agony, to this eternal inter- 
course with God : " Now, O Father, glorify Thou me with 
Thine own self, with the glory which I had with Thee be- 
fore the world was." All that He knew, the richness, the 



266 THE FOOD OF MAN. 

feeding and strengthening power of the word of God. 
And now He had been made man, and was here upon the 
earth. With his human flesh He had assumed human 
necessities which He had never known by His own ex- 
perience before. That hunger, which has so ruled men 
always, which has made them violate duty, commit great 
crimes, sacrifice their strongest natural affections ; that 
need of bread, which, working steadily, has developed 
man into all the progress of civilization, and, working vio- 
lently and spasmodically, has turned man into a brute ; 
that need of bread, which always lies primary among the 
forces that control men's lives, had taken hold of this new 
human life of Jesus. It was a real temptation. He was 
genuinely an hungered. This compulsion of the lower 
natui'e has, for the first time perhaps in Him, met the 
compulsion of the higher nature under which He has 
wholly lived. Now will He yield? His whole work, 
our whole hope, hangs upon His decision. There was, 
there must have been, a real chance of His yielding. But 
as we look at Him, we see that He will not yield. The 
old eternal joy of serving God outweighs the new temp- 
tation of the senses. It grows clear before Him that the 
higher life of the spirit is more precious than, is worth 
any sacrifice of, the lower life of the flesh. He says, " I 
choose." The victory is won. " Let me be hungry, but 
let me not disobey God." 

But we see also, in this reply of Jesus, how thoroughly 
He had entered into and identified Himself with the hu- 
manity which He had assumed. He takes His temptation 
as a man. He gives His answer as a man. It is not 
the speech of one bringing a superior nature, clothed 
in superior strength, and so capable of an exceptional re- 



THE FOOD OF MAN. 267 

sistance where ordinary manhood must give way. It is 
not, " I, as God, must have divine sustenance, and so can 
do without your human food." It is, " Man shall not 
live by bread alone." Simply as men, we all, the poorest 
and the greatest of us all together, need the life of obedi- 
ence, and any sacrifice of the flesh is cheap that wins it 
for us. Here was the second value of the temptation of 
Christ. It was not only the divine Mediator preparing 
Himself for His task, and proving the temper of the arms 
with which He was to fight the battle ; it was the high- 
est, the perfect man, becoming conscious of himself, and 
declaring, in behalf of all humanity, the universal human 
necessities. " I, ^s man," he says, " need more than 
bread. I must not be satisfied, I am not satisfied, with 
mere food for the body : I must have truth." Humanity 
was tested there. Can it in this supreme specimen of it 
be satisfied with bread ? If it can, then all these dreams, 
these cravings, these discontents, these importunate de- 
mands of men for spiritual things, for truth, for duty, for 
God, are mere chimeras. If it cannot, if this man, the 
best of men, says that food is not enough for man, then 
no man ought to be satisfied so long as he has only the 
mere nourishment that feeds the body. " Man shall not 
live by bread alone." No doubt it all seemed perfectly 
clear to Jesus. It was almost a truism to Him. Hu- 
manity lay perfectly open to His consciousness. Read- 
ing Himself, He read man as man never had been read 
by man before. He said. That is not life which bread 
alone can feed. Life for man means a spiritual condi- 
tion which only spiritual forces can supply. Therefore 
of course, man shall not Live by bread alone. It is like 
saying that a tree cannot live merely upon water. It 



268 THE FOOD OF MAN. 

needs other elements wbicli tlie rich earth must give. 
That is its nature. 

And one thing more about this assertion by Christ of 
the higher necessities of man. He does not simply dis- 
cern them in His own human consciousness. It is notice- 
able that He also corroborates them out of the past ex- 
perience of men. He not merely sees in Himself that 
man cannot live at his fullest except in obedience to 
God ; He also discovers in the past that men have found 
this out and recognized it. For, notice, His reply is a 
quotation : " It is written, Man shall not live by bread 
alone." He quotes from the speech which Moses had 
made to the people of Israel after they had crossed the 
desert, and when they were just about to enter the prom- 
ised land. He says, Moses found out there in his desert 
what I have found here in my wilderness. He wrote it 
down, and here I find it true. So He appeals to expe- 
rience. He strengthens his own present consciousness by 
the assurance that other men have known the same ; that 
it has always been true. As He had said before. It is 
not something which belongs to me in my exceptional 
divine nature, but it belongs to all men ; so He says now, 
It is not true only in these special, temporary conditions ; 
it has always been true. The best and most human men 
have always known it, — that man was soul as well as 
body, and that he did not really live unless he had not 
merely bread for the body, but truth and duty, God's 
word, for the soul. 

This was the certainty, then, to which Jesus came in 
the wilderness ; a certainty both from consciousness and 
from experience. Now, if we can put ourselves into 
Christ's position ; if we can see, as it were, this cer- 



THE FOOD OF MAN. 2G9 

tainty growing up in His soul, then we have before us 
the perfect picture of the opening struggle of every no- 
ble life. The life begins in sense. The existence of 
childhood is all a bondage to the senses. Gradually it 
emerges, bat very slowly, very unconsciously; until at 
last there comes some test. As we study the Gospels, 
and think upon human life, it becomes very wonderful, 
it seems to me, how, in the very order of its circum- 
stances as well as in its drift and spirit, that life of Jesus 
represents the lives of all men. Just at the outset of our 
work, to try us whether we are good for our work, God's 
Spirit takes us into some solitude, some experience which, 
whether it be enacted far off in the woods, or in the very 
centre of a crowded street, makes us realize for the first 
time that our deepest life is alone, is ours and no other 
man's ; that we cannot live in our fathers and our moth- 
ers ; that we must live for ourselves. That is our wilder- 
ness, — that first realization of our individuality. In that 
wilderness, in that first conception of himself as a re- 
sponsible and solitary being, every young man meets the 
same devil that the young Jesus met. And the tempta- 
tion is the same ; the assurance given in some form or 
other that bread is all that a man needs ; that everything 
else is a delusion ; that to live a life of physical comfort 
is the only solid wish for a man's soul. Perhaps it is a 
business which he knows is wrong, but sees must be 
profitable. Perhaps it is the abandonment of those he 
ought to cai-e for so that he may himself get rich. Per- 
haps it is the hiding of his sincere convictions in order 
to keep his place in some social company. Perhaps it is 
connivance with a wicked man's sin in order to preserve 
his favor. Perhaps it is tlie postponing of charity to 



270 THE FOOD OF MAN. 

some future day when it shall be easier. Perhaps it is a 
refusal to acknowledge Christ, the Master, out of fear, or 
because some easy, foolish friendship would be sacrificed. 
Perhaps it is simply the giving up of ambitions, intel- 
lectual or spiritual, for the sake of quiet, unperturbed 
respectability. These are real struggles. There is no 
boy who comes into the life which Jesus entered in His 
Incarnation who does not pass through the door which 
He passed through, and meet the devil of these questions 
where He met him. And the answer that every modern 
young man makes, the victory which he wins, if he does 
win, must be like Christ's, too. That double witness, 
that decree of God written on the two tables of con- 
sciousness and experience, must be, and is, what every 
man appeals to, who, taking his stand before the tempter, 
says, " No ! I will live not for bread alone, but for truth 
and duty." He appeals first to consciousness. " Tell 
me," he says to his tempter, " here are certain powers 
in me, powers of studying, thinking, loving, generously 
suffering. What am I to do with those powers in the 
life which you want me to live ? It cannot be that that 
is the life which I was meant to live, or these powers 
would not be in me. Man cannot live by bread alone." 
And then he appeals to experience. " Other men, in 
other days, have lived not for the flesh, but for the spirit, 
and have left it on record that though they missed of 
wealth and fame, they knew that so they found their 
true life. Their history confirms my study of myself. 
I read my duty in their stories. ' It is written, Man 
shall not live by bread alone.' " That is the way in 
which the young man, to-day, here among us, enters by 
the same two-leaved door into the same victory which 



THE FOOD OF MAN. 271 

Jesus won years ago upon that dark and dreary hill in 
Palestine. 

I know this seems to be drawing the picture too dra- 
matically. " There was no such trial-moment, no such 
crisis in my life," you say. " There has been nothing 
to compare with that awful mountain and the darkness 
and the hunger and the present Satan." But still the 
same has come to you that came to Christ. The dra- 
matic incidents were not essential then. Jesus might 
have had all that temptation while he sat in His mother's 
house at Nazareth, or while He travelled in the noisy 
caravan returning from Jerusalem. In either place He 
might have yielded and given up the work that He had 
come for. In either place He might have seen the glory 
of that work, and surrendered everything else for the 
privilege of doing it. If Christ had yielded, can we not 
picture Him as He descends the mountain ? He has 
tasted bread. His knees are strong. His famished body 
has received new vigor, but what a weight is on His soul ! 
How He loathes the bread that He has eaten ! How beau- 
tiful seems the chance that He has cast away ! What a 
terrible defeat ! And so one wonders if the men who 
have given up their chance of usefulness and goodness, 
merely to live an easy life, do not ache through all their 
luxury with the sense of their defeat and of all that they 
have lost. So many of our lives come crawling down the 
mountain, well-fed and comfortable, despising themselves 
and envying the poor hungry men who still are doing 
some of God's work, and living the lives He gave them. 
But draw the other picture in your mind. Think of 
Christ after He has conquered, coming down with His 
victory won, with His life yet to live indeed, with His 



272 THE FOOD OF MAN. 

work and suffering still before Him, but with the resolu- 
tion, the principle, of His life established, and there is 
your man who has chosen right, who from His own con- 
sciousness and from the best experience of all best men 
has learned indeed that it is not by bread alone, but by 
the word of God, that He must live. 

But let us ask now a little more carefully, what it is 
for which consciousness and the best experience of our 
race unite in saying that the immediate advantage and 
pleasure of the senses must be surrendered. Jesus de- 
scribed it to His tempter as " The word of God." " Not 
by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out 
of the mouth of God." And the word of God includes 
two notions, one of revelation and one of commandment. 
"Whenever God speaks by any of His voices, it is first to 
tell us some truth which we did not know before, and 
second to bid us do something which we have not been 
doing. Every word of God includes these two. Truth 
and duty are always wedded. There is no truth which 
has not its corresponding duty. And there is no duty 
which has not its corresponding truth. We are always 
separating them. We are always trying to learn truths, 
as if there were no duties belonging to them, as if the 
knowing of them would make no difference in the way 
we lived. That is the reason why our hold on the truths 
we learn is so weak. And we are always trying to do 
duties as if there were no truths behind them ; as if, that 
is, they were mere arbitrary things which rested on no 
principles and had no intelligible reasons. That is the 
reason why we do our duties so superficially and unrelia- 
bly. When every truth is rounded into its duty, and 
every duty is deepened into its truth, then we shall have 



THE FOOD OF MAN. 273 

a clearness and consistency and permanence of moral life 
which we hardly dream of now. 

Every word of God, then, is both truth and duty, rev- 
elation and commandment. He who takes any new word 
of God completely gets both a new truth and a new duty. 
He, then, who lives by every word of God, is a man who 
is continually seeing new truth and accepting the duties 
that arise out of it. And it is for this, for the pleasure 
of seeing truth and doing its attendant duty, that he is 
willing to give up the pleasures of sense, and even, if 
need be, to give up the bodily life to which the pleasures 
of sense belong. As a man keeps or loses his capacity 
of doing this, of weighing these two against each other, 
and deciding rightly which is the more precious, he keeps 
or loses his manhood. The real first question that you 
want to ask about any new man whom you meet, and 
whom you desire to measure, is not whether he is rich or 
poor, fashionable or unfashionable, learned or unlearned, 
but whether he has kept this capacity ; whether if God 
showed him that something was true and out of that 
truth there issued some duty for him, he would be able 
and willing to put his comfort aside, p,nd take the duty 
and perform it. I think that one of the most interesting 
things about our relations to our fellow-men is the way 
in which we feel in them the presence or the absence of 
this capacity. I do not say that our feeling about them 
is unerring. Again and again we find ourselves mis- 
taken. But about almost every man whom we know, I 
think we have some feeling of this sort. To each one 
we apply this test. Two men are living side by side, in 
the same comfort, in the same easy business. Ever)-- 

want of each is satisfied completely. How is it that I 
18 



274 THE FOOD OF MAN. 

know about these men that if God were to make known 
to both of them together the truth that a multitude of 
His people were being wronged, and the consequent duty 
were plain to both of them that they ought to brave 
everything and sacrifice everything to claim their rights 
for the ojDpressed, one of them would certainly leave his 
house and all his luxuries without a moment's hesitation 
to go and do this work, and the other wovild refuse the 
task, and let the wrongs go on unrighted till the judg- 
ment day ? Why is it that we feel the difference ? Why 
is it that we cannot help thinking whether every man is 
living by bread or living by the word of God ? It is be- 
cause that is the real fundamental mark of manhood. It 
is because all other distinctions between man and man 
are superficial and insignificant. That alone lets us see 
thoroughly what sort of men they are. 

Our judgments of other men, by this or any other 
standard, are of small account. We come to feel more 
and more, I think, how utterly unimportant is what we 
think of our brethren, or what they think of us. It is 
generally all wrong, or, if right, it is right by accident. 
But how is it with our judgments of ourselves? Can 
we ask ourselves what we are living by ? If the test 
came to us, if our superficial anxieties about ourselves 
were swept aside, so that the only real anxiety which a 
man has a right to feel about his life were manifest, as a 
strong wind sweeps the mist out of the mountain valley 
and lets us see the rock, is there any rock there to see, 
any real care for truth and righteousness, for the truth 
that issues in duty and the duty that comes by truth ? 

I know with what a rebuke such questions come to all 
of us. I know how they uncover the shallowness and 



THE FOOD OF MAN. 275 

selfishness in which we live. As we ask them of our- 
selves, and look around upon the world, it seems some- 
times as if it all were hopeless ; as if everybody was liv- 
ing by bread alone, and nobody by the word of God, 
which we saw meant truth and duty. But on this as on 
all subjects connected with the actual condition of man- 
kind, I hold that despair and misanthropy are no less 
false in fact, and are even more mischievous as a philos- 
ophy, than the other extreme of optimism. While we do 
see men slaves to their senses, sacrificing the true to the 
easier false, and duty to the immediate expediency, there 
is, and every man ought to know for his encouragement 
that there is, a deep and constant witness in human his- 
tory of man's undying capacity for the higher life. We 
must not lose sight of it. Tiie temptation of Jesus was, 
as I think we saw, not a splendid, solitary victor}'^ of 
divinity over human conditions. It was the assertion of 
the possible victory that waits for every man who, like 
Christ, has in him the power of divinity. Jesus found 
in His human consciousness the original purpose of hu- 
man life. He brought it out clearly. He said. It is not 
the divine prerogative alone. Here it is in man, — the 
power to live, not for comfort but for truth and duty. 
Here it is in this humanity of mine, along with all else 
that is truly human, all my tastes and propensities, all 
ray aches and pains. Here it is in me, and, lo ! other 
men have found it in themselves. " It is written, i\In,n 
shall not live by bread alone." 

And men, all the more clearly since Jesus showed it 
there, are always finding in their own consciousness, and 
in the prolonged consciousness of their race wliieh we 
call experience or history, this same higher capacity or 



276 THE FOOD OF MAN. 

higher necessity of man. They find it in their own con- 
sciousness. What do we make of every strong young 
man's discontent with the actual conditions of things be- 
fore he settles down into the limited contentment, the 
sense that things are about as good as they are likely 
to be, which makes up the dull remainder of his life ? 
Question yourself and see how there is something in you 
which rebels when the lower expediency of any action 
is set before you as its sufficient justification, how some- 
thing rises up in you and tells you that there is a higher 
expediency, and makes you want to sweep away the 
worldly maxims which you cannot confute, but which 
you know are false. Sometimes there comes in all of 
us a strong, deep craving to give up this endless, compli- 
cated search after what it is safe or proper or fashion- 
able to believe, and just to seek what is true ; and to get 
rid of these thousand artificial standards of what a man 
is expected to do, and, come of it what will, simply do 
what is right: and when Ave are simply asking, "What is 
right?" the answer always comes. Sometimes the buried 
giant, conscience, stirs under the mountain, and shakes 
all the villages and vineyards which we have planted 
on its sides. And then we are merely finding in our- 
selves, in our humanity, what Jesus found in His when, 
with the devil drawing Him away. He put His hand 
down to the depths of the nature which He had assumed, 
and took out from under all the accumulated rubbish of 
low and artificial needs the original, essential intention 
of man's life, which had been lying there ever since the 
day when God made man in His image. 

One cannot be a misanthrope or a sceptic about this. 
There always is this deeper power in man, and men are 



THE FOOD OF MAN. 277 

always finding it there. I think we are amazed not at 
the rarity, but rather at the abundance, of the power of 
martyrdom. When a great cause breaks out in war, and 
needs its champions, how wonderful it is to us, with our 
low notions of humanity, to see the land with its furrows 
full of the deserted plows from which the men have run 
to go and die for principle, and save their country. How 
wonderfully frequent are the stories that we hear of men 
giving their lives to do their duty. The exception is 
where the engineer of the railroad train which is rushing 
into certain ruin deserts his post ; not where he stands 
still and calm, and is found with the iron clenched in his 
dead hand. No doubt, if he had time to think of it at all, 
he would be surprised at himself in the terrible instant 
when his quick resolve was made. He reaches down 
through the ordinary standards of his life, and takes up 
the deepest one of all, and says, " Man shall not live by 
bread alone, but by every word of God ; and tlie word 
of God which is my duty now says. Stand and die ; and 
so I cannot live except by dying." And in spite of all 
the men who are sacrificing their convictions to their in- 
terests, there are thousands of men who might be at the 
head of things, and rich and famous, if they would only 
give up what they think is true for bread. Oh, it is 
very common ! Men find in their own nature necessities 
which they must submit to, and they do submit to them. 
We can hear in their submission, though it makes them 
very poor, something of that same trumpet-like triumpli 
and exaltation which I think we always feel in those 
words from the lips of the sick and hungry Jesus, " Not 
by bread alone, but by the word of God." 

And what a man finds in his own consciousness, he 



278 THE FOOD OF MAN. 

is strengthened by being able also to recognize in the 
whole history of his race. " It is written " long ago, this 
which he is doing now. He is only tracing over with 
his blood the unfaded characters which other men have 
written in theirs. It is not a mere whim of his, this 
conviction that it is better to serve God than to eat 
bread. It is the corporate conviction of mankind. That 
is a very mysterious support, but it is a real one. It 
plants the weak tree of your will or mine into the rich 
soil of humanit3^ Do not lose that strength. Do not 
so misread history that it shall seem to you when you try 
to do right as if you were the first man that ever tried it. 
Put yourself with your weak little struggle into the com- 
pany of all the stragglers in all time. Recognize in 
your little fight against your avarice, or your untruthful- 
ness, or your laziness, only one skirmish in that battle 
whose field covers the earth, and whose clamor rises and 
falls from age to age, but never wholly dies. See in the 
perpetual struggle of good and evil that the impulse after 
good is eternal, and the higher needs are always asserting 
their necessity. In their persistent assertion read the 
prophecy of their final success and take courage. 

In consciousness and in experience man finds the wit- 
ness of his higher nature. But consciousness and experi- 
ence both of them are weak in all of us. Here is where 
the revelation of Christ comes in. Christ is both the 
revealer of a man's life to himself, and the revealer of 
the world's life to all of us. When I thoroughly appre- 
hend the story of the Gospels, I can see what my own 
nature means in its mysterious movements, and I can 
discover forces which have been at work in all the history 
of mankind to which I have before been blind. As I be- 



THE FOOD OF MAN. 279 

come His servant, the necessity of doing right and know- 
ing truth comes out from my own consciousness and de- 
clares itself. As I see in Him the ruler of history, all 
history becomes luminous with this struggle of the better 
power in man to get the upper hand. This makes clear 
what perhaps you have doubted about as I have spoken 
to you this morning. I have seemed to point to man's 
consciousness and to human history as the revealers of 
man's capacity for truth and duty. " Is it not Christ," 
you say, " who alone can bring or show us any good?" 

Yes indeed and always that is true. But it is by His 
touch laid upon our own natures and the world's experi- 
ence that he sends His light to us. It is He who gives 
them all their voice. Mere stammerers and whisperers 
before, it has been by Him that they have learned to 
speak and give men their incitement and hope. 

Ah, here is the true secret. It is when Christ is in 
you that the highest motives become practicall}' powerful 
upon your life. We think of Christ as the liberator. To 
many souls it is His most attractive character. But we do 
need to know what the character of the liberation which 
He brings us is. It is not simply that as we lie chained 
upon the ground He comes and breaks our chains, and 
lets us lie there still, bound down by the torpor which our 
chained condition has created in us, slaves to our own 
inability to rise. That is not the glorious redemption. 
That is a purely negative freedom. What Christ desires 
to do for you is something far nobler and more divine 
than that. He wants to awaken your dead conscience 
and to quicken into life and invitation the apparently 
dead and depressing experience around you, so that you 
shall feel in yourself the response to higher motives, and 



280 THE FOOD OF MAN. 

recognize in all history the loftier and more spiritual pos- 
sibility of man. If He could do that for you, then there 
would be real liberation. You would no longer be the 
slave of sensible things, not because you had learned to 
despise tliem, not because you thought your business, 
or your home, or your social pleasure contemptible or 
wicked, but because you had seen the joy of higher 
things, — truth, God, charity, character, heaven, — and 
the channel of affection was clear between them and your 
soul. That is true liberty. It does not cast the lower 
things away. As Christ said to Satan, " Man shall not 
live by bread alone." He shall live by bread, but not 
by bread alone. The lower wants are recognized. The 
things that supplied them are not thrown away, but 
they are used no longer to enslave and bind, but simply 
to sustain and steady the life which moves now under 
spiritual impulse ; as the ship which has cast loose from 
its bondage to the shore and goes with wind and steam 
exultantly out to sea still carries some of that shore for 
ballast in its hold. That is the relation which the spir- 
itual man still holds to the things of the senses. The 
man in Christ makes the world serve no longer as dock, 
but as ballast ; no longer as confinement, but as balance 
for the new life which he lives. 

There is great meaning in the words that Jesus was 
continually using to describe the work that He did for 
men's souls. He brought them into " the kingdom of 
God." The whole burden of His preaching was to estab- 
lish the kingdom of God. The purpose of the new birth 
for which He labored was to make men subjects of the 
kingdom of God. Is it not clear what it means ? The 
kingdom of God for any soul is that condition, anywhere 



THE FOOD OF MAN. 281 

in the universe, where God is that soul's king, where it 
seeks and obeys the highest, where it loves truth and 
duty more than comfort and luxury. Have you entered 
into the kingdom of God? Oh, how much that means. 
Has any love of God taken possession of you so that you 
want to do His will above all things, and try to do it all 
the time ? Has Christ brought you there ? If He has, 
how great and new and glorious the life of the kingdom 
seems. No wonder that He said you must be born again 
before you could enter there. How poor life seems out- 
side that kingdom ! How beautiful and glorious inside 
its gates ! 

If I tried to tell you how Christ brings us there, I 
should repeat to you once more the old, familiar story. 
He comes and lives and dies for us. He touches us with 
gratitude. He sets before our softened lives His life. 
He makes us see the beauty of holiness, and the strength 
of the spiritual life in Him. He transfers His life to us 
through the open channel of faith, and so we come to 
live as He lives, by every word that proceedeth out of 
the mouth of God. How old the story is, but how end- 
lessly fresh and true to him whose own career ii de- 
scribes. 

In this world we must be either conquerors or slaves. 
We know what it is to be the world's slaves, but what 
it is to be its conquerors through Christ, that no man 
knows entirely. We come to know it more and more as 
the long struggle and fight go on. We shall know it 
perfectly only when the liberated spirit casts the flesh 
away and goes to live with the God by whom it has lived 
so long. 



XVI. 

THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 

" The sun shall be no more thy light by day : neither for brightness 
shall the moon give light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an 
everlasting light, and thy God thy glory." — Isaiah Ix. 19. 

In the midst of the glowing picture of Messiah's king- 
dom, which Isaiah draws, occur these words. He is tell- 
ing of the wonderful changes which are to come when 
mankind shall have reached perfection under the govern- 
ment of its perfect master. Especially he is speaking to 
the Jewish church and nation. The pages are bright 
with promises. " For brass I will bring gold, and for iron 
I will bring silver, and for wood brass, and for stones iron; 
I will also make tliy officers peace, and thine exactors 
righteousness. Violence shall no more be heard in thy 
land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders; but 
thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise.'" 
And then there comes this other promise, which I quoted 
for my text. The prophet bids his people look forward 
to a time when even the sun and moon shall become 
needless to them ; when in some new and more direct 
experience of God they shall need nothing to reflect His 
light to them, but drink immediately from Himself His 
strength and inspiration. Tliat seems to be the meaning 
of the words ; and so it points us to one feature which 
belongs to every progress, the power to do without one 



THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 283 

thing after another which has before been essential, the 
way in which, as we advance to higher and higher sup- 
plies, we are able to gather out of them what we used to 
get from lower sources. It is like that verse in St. John's 
description of the New Jerusalem : "I saw no temple 
therein, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the 
temple of it." Or like these soberer words of St. Paul's 
autobiography : " When I became a man I put away 
childish things." This life that rises to the highest helps 
and companies is able easily to do without the lower. 

There is no better test of men's progress than this ad- 
vancing power to do without the things which used to 
be essential to their lives. As we climb a high mountain 
we must keep our footing strong upon one ledge until we 
have fastened ourselves stronfflv on the next. Then we 
may let the lower foothold go. The lives of men who 
have been always growing are strewed along their whole 
course with the things which they have learned to do 
without. As the track of an army marching deep into 
an enemy's country is scattered all along with the equi- 
page which the men seemed to find necessary when they 
started, but which they have learned to do without as 
the exigencies of their march grew greater, and they 
found that these provisions and equipments were partly 
such as they did not need at all, and partly such as they 
could gather out of the land through which they marched ; 
so from the time when the child casts his leading strings 
aside because his legs are strong enough to carry him 
alone, the growing man goes on forever leaving each 
help for a higher, until at last, in that great change to 
which Isaiah's words seem to apply, he can do without 
sun and moon as he enters into the immediate presence 
and essential life of God. 



284 THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 

For everytliing is valuable only in relation to the 
powers and tastes to which it is of use. Nothing has 
any value which does not meet and satisfy the hunger of 
some organ of our life, and everything has value only for 
that organ, and that condition of any organ, which it 
satisfies. Books have no value, directly, for the taste, 
nor bread for the mind. Now every power that is in us, 
if it is healthy, hungers after food, and it will seize like 
any hungry thing on what food it can find. But every 
power is capable of culture, capable of being brought 
up to appreciate higher and higher foods. And as each 
power comes to a higher condition, and finds its higher 
food and learns to love it, it is able to let go the food in 
which it has delighted simply because it must delight in 
something, and to rest in its new-found higher satisfac- 
tion. And what is true of every single power is true 
about the aggregate of powers, — our total self considered 
as one whole. We must have what will give us pleasure 
and occupy our lives. But as we grow we come to the 
capacity of higher pleasures and higher occupations, and 
so let go the lower ones ; not by compulsion, because we 
cannot hold them any longer, but from the satisfaction of 
our newer lives ; because we have got something else 
better than they are, and can do without them now. 
This is the Avay in which a true man puts away child- 
ish things. This is the meaning of that pleasing sort of 
regret with which we sometimes go back to the occupa- 
tions of our childhood, to the books we used to read, 
the tasks we used to study, the friends with whom we 
trifled, the fields where we idly wandered. We think 
we want all these things back again. We think we 
should be happy if they were all restored to us once 



■ THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 285 

more, but when we touch tliem we find their charm is 
gone ; and with a strange and pathetic mixture of dis- 
content and pride, of pain and joy, we. learn that he who 
has grown to any higher life not only may, but must, 
do without his old satisfactions. Sometimes you see a 
young man who has not grown. No higher work, no 
higher life has opened to him ; and what marks him as 
different from his growing comrades, what shows how 
they have outstripped him, is just this : that they can do 
without what he must have. They have put away child- 
ish things for their manly occupations, while he must 
still be busy with his little vanities and conceits and 
plays and emulations, because he has grown up to noth- 
ing else, as the idiot of forty will play still with the toys 
of babyhood. 

Now this change from childhood into manhood is only 
the picture of all the spiritual and moral advances which 
men make through all their lives. Every imperfect con 
dition is to the perfect condition what the child's life is to 
the man's life ; and the advance from one to the other, 
if we examine it, is always a change into greater and 
more complete reality. The things which childhood val- 
ues are the symbols or types of the things which the 
man will value by and by, and the reason why the man 
is able to let the child's treasures drop and do without 
them is that he has reached the reality which those 
precious things of childhood only represented. The man 
does not want the boy's sports, because he has found in 
the serious work of life the true field for those emulations 
and activities which were only practising and trying 
tliemselves in the play-ground. The man can do with- 
out the boy's perpetual physical activity, because he has 



286 THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 

come to the pleasures of an active mind which the rest- 
lessness of the child's body, his pleasure in mere move- 
ment, anticipated and prophesied. It seems as if the 
change from boyhood into a true manhood could not be 
more justly described than as an advance from dealing 
with symbols to dealing with realities. And if, then, 
every progress in life is a change from some new boy- 
hood to some yet riper manhood ; if every man is a child 
to his own possible maturer self ; may it not be truly 
stated that all the spiritual advances of life are advances 
from some symbol to its reality, and tliat the abandoned 
interests and occupations which strew the path which we 
have travelled are the symbols which we have cast away 
easily because we had grasped the realities for which 
they stood? 

Such an idea, if it were true, would seem to help and 
enlighten us in various ways. It would make us look 
with complacency, without regret, upon the things which 
we have left behind us. It would help us to understand 
our neighbors who make nothing of, or make very light 
of, what we prize very much. On the other hand, it 
would give us a charitable understanding of and hope for 
our other neighbors who are still caring very much about 
things which we have ceased to value ; and it would al- 
low us to find great pleasure in many things, while all 
the time we know that we cannot rest in them forever, 
that sometime we must pass beyond them to the higher 
and complete things of which they are only the symbols. 

Let us take two or three instances of those things 
which are valuable as symbols, but which he is able to do 
without who has got beyond the symbol and gained the 
reality which it represents. Take the instance of wealth. 



THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 287 

There are some men who can do without being rich, — 
plenty of men who have to, but some men who can, can 
easily, can without discontent or trouble. They have 
the universal human passions. They are not monsters in 
the shape of men, much as it may appear as if they were, 
in the midst of the crowd of money seekers. They love 
comfort and respectability as much as these their neigh- 
bors. What is the difference ? Simply this, that they 
have found that comfort and respectability, while money 
is their natural symbol, are not dependent upon money, 
and that one may reach past the symbol and take the 
reality, and let the symbol go. Is it not true, and is it 
not striking, that while we all feel that comfort and 
respectability are natui-ally symbolized by wealth, yet 
the most comfortable and respectable men in town are 
not always, perhaps are very rarely, the wealthiest men ? 
The symbol is good, but there will always be some men 
who have seized the reality so completely that they can 
do without the symbol. How it shows when two men 
fail. One of them keeps his honor, his good repute, his 
self-respect, and he can do without money. He has the 
reality, and can let the symbol go. The other man has 
nothing : no respect of other men, no respect of himself. 
He has nothing but the money. When that is gone he 
has nothing. He cannot do without it, and so he flees to 
the pistol, or the poison, or the river. There is this lam- 
entable lack of the power to do without money, which 
makes these men the slave of their money. The fact is 
that every symbol ought to be always fitting us to do 
without itself. Money ought to be making us indifferent 
to money; to be preparing us to be cheerfully poor; to 
be building tastes and powers within itself, like a house 



288 THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 

within a scaffolding, so that the scaffolding may come 
down and the house still stand. For how many of our 
rich men is their wealth doing that ; but certainly, if his 
wealth is not doing that for a man, he is the slave of 
his wealth and not its master. 

Or take another symbol. Praise is good. To be ap- 
plauded by our fellow-men, to hear our ambitions about 
ourselves caught up by their testifying cheers, to have 
our own best hopes for our own lives confirmed by their 
appreciation of us, that is a true delight for any man. 
To be able to do without men's praise because we do not 
feel its value, because morosely and selfishly we do not 
care what men think, that is bad ; that is a sign of fee- 
bleness and conceit. To feel it is wretched, and to affect 
to feel it is detestable. But to be able to do without 
men's praise because that which their praise stands for is 
dearer to us than the praise is, and it so happens that 
we cannot have both of them, that is a wholly different 
thing. The first man has sunk below the necessity of 
men's applause, the second man has risen above it. The 
poor, demoralized beggar and the calm, philosophic ser- 
vant of God, standing together in the street, neither of 
them may care much whether men praise or blame him, 
— both of them can do without applause. But how dif- 
ferent they are. Both can do without the sunlight; but 
one is the mole crawling out of sight of the sun under 
ground, the other is the angel who lives beyond the sun 
with God. For men's praise stands for goodness. Every 
man feels that if it does not mean that, if it is given to 
iniquity just as freely as to goodness, praise loses all its 
value. Praise is the symbol ; goodness is the reality. 
But if we cannot let the praise go in order to be good. 



THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 289 

if we dare not do right though every tongue of man 
broke out in wild abuse of us together, then once more 
the symbol has us in its tyranny. We are not its mas- 
ters, able to do without it, able to say to it any day, 
"You may go now; I have used you long enough. You 
have done all that you can for me. Now you are begin- 
ning not to help me, but to harm me." We are its ser- 
vants, only daring to ask of it humbly, " What would 
you have me do that I may more completely win your 
favor, O praise of men ? " 

So it runs everywhere. The symbols of the deeper 
pleasures are the mere animal indulgences, — eating and 
drinking, the lusts of the flesh. They stand for intellect- 
ual and spiritual joys. How natural their symbolism is. 
The Bible talks of " hungering and thirsting after right- 
eousness." David says, " Taste and see that the Lord is 
good." Jesus tells His disciples about " eating His flesh 
and drinking His blood." The superficial emotions of the 
senses stand for and represent the profound emotions of 
the soul. In the harmonious life the two will live in 
harmony. The symbol and reality, the body's and the 
soul's enjoyment, will be complete together. But when 
in this unharmonious life in which we live the symbol 
and reality come into unnatural conflict, when either the 
soul must be sacrificed to the body or the body to the 
soul, he wlio really knows what the soul's happiness is 
does not hesitate. He is able to do without the sensual, 
delight. He can be hungry and thirsty, and deny every 
lust its indulgence, that he may be pure and true and 
godly. He can be starved and famished in the symbol, 
that he may eat and chink deep of the reality. You say, 
"I cannot do it. These passions at least must have their 

19 



290 THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 

way. I was made so. I cannot do without this gratifica- 
tion." No, certainly not, unless you can come to what 
that gratification stands for. If you can do that ; if you 
can really see the beauty of goodness and purity, and 
love that ; and then if this gratification coming in con- 
flict Avith them means sin, then you can easily lose it, 
for it will have lost its charm for you. Not that it will 
seem better to you to be good than to be happy, as men 
sometimes say, but the only possible happiness for you 
will be in being good. 

You see that I am speaking not only of things that are 
wrong in themselves. Nay ; I am speaking mainly of 
tilings which are not wrong in themselves, but which the 
time comes for a man to do without because he cannot 
have them and the better things which they represent to- 
gether. A tree's leaves are symbols ; they mean growth ; 
they stand for health and life as they rustle and sparkle 
in the summer wind and sunshine. But the day comes 
when the tree, to keep its healthy life, must cast its leaves 
aside and stand bare and naked through the long winter, 
losing the symbol to keep the reality. A man's limbs 
mean manhood. They stand for the fact of his manly 
strength to himself and to the world. But the time 
comes in battle, at his sentry post, when the man must 
either lose his limbs or lose his honor ; and then, rather 
than be a coward, he lets a part of himself go ; for now 
to be maimed and not to be complete means strength and 
the perfectness of manhood. And here is the power of 
true self-sacrifice; here is the secret which takes out of it 
all the bitterness and brutality. Always it is the giving 
up of a symbol that you may have the reality. In the 
great sacrifice of all, Christ lays down His life, but it is 



THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 201 

that He may take it again. Do you think that Christ 
did not care for hfe and all that makes life beautiful to 
us ? Surely He did, but He cared more for that which 
they represent, — the living purely, the doing of His 
Father's will, and the serving of His brethren. Tliat 
was why He was able to do without the things which 
seem to be absolutely essential to our lives ; because He 
was so much more full than we are of the beauty and 
glory of the life with God. That was the power by 
which He was able to speak harsh words when He would 
gladly have indulged Himself in speaking kind and soft 
words. And when we control our weak good-nature, and 
will not do some mere indulgent action to a friend or 
child, in order that we may help that child or friend to 
some manly work or vigorous self-control, we are doing 
in our way what Jesus did when He surrendered the 
mere pleasure of pleasing the world for the higher and 
more perfect joy of saving the world. 

I am very much impressed by the truth of all this as 
concerns the Christian Church. She has her symbols and 
her ordinances, and she has her true and inner life. Her 
outward ways of living really belong with her inward 
power. In a perfectly harmonious world there never 
could be any conflict. In Heaven the outward and the 
inward church shall absolutely correspond ; but here and 
now the church may be so set upon her symbols and her 
regularities that she shall fail of doing her most perfect 
work and living her most perfect life. The Christian 
may be so bound to rites and ceremonies that he loses the 
God to whom they ought to bring him near. The con- 
gregation may be so jealous for its liturgy that it loses 
the power of prayer. The church at large may make so 



202 THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 

much of its apostolic ministry that it loses the present 
ministry of Christ Himself. Here it certainly is true 
that no symbol is doing its true work unless it is educat- 
ing those who use it to do without itself, if need be. The 
Christian is misusing his rites and ceremonies, unless 
they are bringing him more personally and immediately 
rear to God. The congregation is not using its liturgy 
aright if it is getting more and more unable to worship 
except in just that form and order; and the church is suf- 
fering and not thriving by her ancient ministry if she 
is making it exclusive and mechanical, and calling none 
the ministers of Christ who have not that ordination. 
Everywhere the letter stands for the spirit, and to give 
up the letter, that the spirit may live more fully, becomes 
from time to time the absolute necessity of the living 
church. 

Have I then made clear our law? Among the tests of 
men there stands very high this power to do without. A 
man says, " You need not talk to me about this luxury, 
this habit. The time may come when I shall have to 
sacrifice my principle to keep it, but I cannot live with- 
out it." Another man says, " I like this, but I despise 
the thought that it should become essential to me, that I 
should not be able to do without it." Are not those two 
men ranked ? Do you not know which is the greater 
and the stronger, which is the smaller and the weaker 
man? But then this power of doing without some things 
is, we have seen, at its bottom a power of not doing 
without other things. We are rescued from the abject 
slavery of the lower by entering into the absolute ser- 
vantship of the higher. He to whom honor is necessary 
can do without money. He who must have goodness 



THK SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 293 

can get along Avitliout praise. He who must bave God's 
communion can do without the sweet companionships 
of fellow-men. He who cannot lose his eternity can 
easily cast aside time and the body which belongs to 
it, and by the martyr's slow or sudden death exchange 
the visible for the invisible, the symbol for the reality. 
Nay, he who values most intensely his friend's or his 
child's eternal life can, not easily but still not grudgingly, 
let go the joy and daily comfort of his friend's or his 
child's hourl}'^ presence, and see him die that he may enter 
into life. On these two ladders, as it were, by these two 
scales, the order of human character mounts up, — the 
power to do without and the power not to do without. 
As you grow better there are some things which are 
always growing looser in their grasp upon you ; there are 
other things which are always taking tighter hold upon 
your life. You sweep up out of the grasp of money, 
praise, ease, distinction. You sweep up into the neces- 
sity of truth, courage, virtue, love, and God. The gravi- 
tation of the earth grows weaker, the gravitation of the 
stars takes stronger and stronger hold upon you. And 
on the other hand, as you grow worse, as you go down, 
the terrible opposite of all this comes to pass. The high- 
est necessities let you go, and the lowest necessities take 
tighter hold of you. Still, as you go down, you are 
judged by what you can do without and what you can- 
not do without. You come down at last where you can- 
not do without a comfortable dinner and an easy bed, but 
you can do without an act of charity or a thought of 
God. The poor sot finds his misery sealed with this 
double seal, that he cannot miss his glass of liquor, and 
lie can miss without a sigh every good company and 
virtuous wish. 



294 THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 

Oh, test your lives by this. Judge where you stand by 
"what are your necessities. Oh, stretch yourselves and see 
where you touch your chains, and thank God if you are 
really, by His culture, growing more and more able to 
spare the temjDorary symbols, less and less able to do 
without the eternal realities of life. 

But now, before I close, let me try to answer one or 
two questions which I most earnestly hope have arisen in 
some of your minds while I have spoken. I think that 
I have spoken in vain unless some such questions have 
sprung up. First you will ask. How can I tell the symbol 
from the reality, and so know what things it is good to 
hold less and less, what things it is good to hold more 
and more indispensable ? It is not easy to give the an- 
swer in a rule. But the answer no doubt lies in a certain 
feeling of spirituality and infiniteness and eternity, which 
belongs to those things which it is good for a man not to 
be able to do without. Those things which serve the 
soul rather than the body, those which serve the whole 
of us and not one special part, and those which can serve 
us longest, — those are the things which we want to make 
more and more indispensable. Those things whose use- 
fulness belongs mainly to the body, those things which 
help some part of us and not the whole, and those things 
whose use is temporary, — it is not good for any of us to 
have to say, " I cannot do without these things." This 
is, perhaps, the nearest that we can come to rules ; but 
he who lives in the spirit of these rules acquires a cer- 
tain sort of feeling of the infiniteness of some things and 
the finiteness of others, so that renown, wealth, dignity, 
sympathy, comfort, friendship, amusement, life, stand on 
one side ; and honor, truth, bravery, purity, love, eter- 



THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 295 

nity, God, stand on the other. These last he must have. 
Those others he can do without. The moment that he 
touches any new gift he can tell to which order it be- 
longs. 

But then you say, What then ? When I have felt this 
difference, when I know what things I must not allow to 
become indispensable to me, what shall I do then ? Shall 
I throw all those things away ? Shall I strip my life in- 
stantly of all that is not indispensable, and live only in 
those things which I cannot live without ? No ; certainly 
not. That effort to cast away the symbol as soon as it 
was seen to be a symbol has been the source of much 
religious unhappiness and failure, and of much of the 
wrong kind of separation between religious and irrelig- 
ious life. Not to give up the symbol, but to hold it as a 
symbol, with that looser grasp which lets its inner reality 
escape into us, and at the same time makes us always 
ready to let it go when the reality shall have wholly 
opened from it, that is the true duty of the Christian 
as concerns the innocent things of the world. That was 
the way in which Jesus always seemed to be holding 
friendship, home, nature, and His own human life ; never 
grasping them so tightly that their spiritual meanings 
might not come forth from them freely, nor that He 
could not give them up when a higher vocation sum- 
moned Him. The Christian is a man in the world. The 
difference between him and the man of the world must 
not be in sharp separation of all their occupations. It 
must be in the different ways in which they hold their 
worldly things. How easily, with what a sense of mas- 
tery, you hold what all the time you know that you can do 
witiiout. The beggar, the ruined man, the poor woman, 



296 THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 

with just one piece of money left, with no chance to get 
another if that is lost, clutches that piece of money tight, 
and, casting suspicious looks on every side, hurries along 
the street. The rich man, with his balance in the banks, 
holds his one coin lightly, and without anxiety parts with 
it with an easy grace for luxury or charity. That is the 
difference between the religious and the irreligious use of 
the world. The Christian works by your side in busi- 
ness or society, but do not think that business is to him 
the absorbing anxiety, or society the feverish race, that it 
is to you. He has not staked his everything upon their 
game. He can afford to lose, and yet go away calm and 
with the infiniteness of his life untouched. He is like 
Jesus, whom His disciples could not understand. They 
said unto Him, Master, eat. But He said unto them, I 
have meat to eat that ye know not of. Therefore said 
the disciples one to another. Hath any man brought Him 
aught to eat ? Jesus saith unto them. My meat is to do 
the will of Him that sent me, and to finish His work. 
So the Christian, with larger, looser grasp, holds the 
things of earth and gathers out of them all the more rich- 
ness and strength because he is not their slave, but their 
master, and can do without them if his higher duties or 
interests shall need it. 

There is nothing that impresses us all so much as to 
see another man easily do without what is the very life 
of our life. "This man has not my money," you say; 
" but he would have it if he could. He goes without it 
only because he cannot get it." But by and by you see 
another man put money which he might have under his 
feet, and for the sake of learning or religion quietly take 
up the life of poverty. That startles you. You cannot 



THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 297 

understand it. But is it not true that all of us have had 
our best revelations of the value of things out of just 
such sights as that ; have had our false despotic standards 
thrown off their pedestals when we saw a nobler man 
easily neglect them, as the idol fell down on his face 
when the ark of Jehovah was brought into the house of 
Dagon, the Philistine's god ? 

And that brings us to the last question. How shall I 
come to count nothing indispensable but what I really 
ought to, what I really cannot do without? The answer 
to that question is in Christ, who holds the answers of 
all our questions for us. As I read the Gospels I can see 
how, little by little, Jesus lifted those disciples past one 
conception of necessity after another, until at last they 
knew nothing that was absolutely necessary except God. 
They began as fishermen who could not do without their 
nets and boats and houses and fishing friends and sports 
and gains and gossipings. He carried theui up tilj they 
were crying, " Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth 
us." That wonderful change — how wonderful it was we 
foT'get, because the story is so familiar — He brought about 
by showing them His salvation. When, living with Him, 
they saw the glory of forgiveness and regeneration, saw 
the new life that opened before those who really knew 
His grace, everything changed to them. It was not so 
important how they fared, what food they ate, what they 
wore, how many fish they caught. " All these things do 
the nations of the earth seek after." To them the ques- 
tions shifted. The tests of life swept higher up. Were 
they indeed His? Had they caught His spirit? Were 
they living His life? Had they part in His eternity? 
And so when you and I really desire the salvation of 



298 THE SYMBOL AND THE REALITY. 

Christ, He will do for us all that He did for them. Our 
tests of life, too, shall sweep up. Not, Is my body well ? 
but, Is the soul strong? Not, Is my friend sure to live 
here by my side ? but. Is he living with God ? Not, 
Am I myself sure of the life here ? but, Am I already 
living the life that is forever? Health, companionship, 
life itself, these are no longer indispensable when Christ 
has shown us God. A resignation that is not despair, 
but aspiration ; a looser grasp on time, that means how 
strongly we are holding to eternity ; this must come to 
us when, after all our doing of little temporary things, 
we have at last begun in Christ the life and work that 
is to go on forever and forever. Then even the most es- 
sential things of this world we can do without, if need 
be. We have passed from the lower to the higher neces- 
sities. We walk by faith, and not by sight. Already, 
even while we are yet in the flesh, before we cross the 
river, the promise finds its fulfilment. We live in the 
world, but we do not live by the world. Already the 
sun is no more our light by day ; neither for brightness 
does the moon give light unto us ; but the Lord is unto 
us an everlasting light, and our God our glory. 



XVII. 

CHRIST'S AVISH FOR MAN. 

" Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given me be with me 
where I am ; that they may behold my glory." — John xvii. 24. 

The truth that men are judged by their desires finds 
its highest illustration in Jesus. The perfection of His 
nature is shown in the perfectness of His wishes. When 
His desires shall be all fulfilled, when He " shall see of 
the travail of His soul and .be satisfied," then the con- 
summation of all things will have been reached, and 
there will be nothing more in the universe to be desired. 

Let us take this morning one of Christ's wishes and 
study it, see what it means, and what would be the effect 
of Its fulfilment. It is a prayer ; but a prayer in its sim- 
plest definition is merely a wish turned Godward. It 
w^as the instinct of Christ's nature that He looked for 
the fulfilment of His wishes, not to Himself and not to 
the things about Him, but to His Father; and so in His 
prayer we have simply the utterance Godward of what 
He was desiring in His heart : " Father, I will that they 
also whom Thou hast given me be with me where I am ; 
that they may behold my glory." 

This wish was spoken at Christ's last sup{)er with His 
disciples. They were sitting late around their simple 
table, and soon their separation was to come, the be- 
trayal and the crucifixion. The first interest of the 



300 . Christ's wish for man. 

words, then, tliat which introduces us to and makes us 
ready for all the deeper things which they express, is 
their obvious meaning as an expression of the Saviour's 
affection for His disciples. His dread of being separated 
from them. When friend is going away from friend, 
how naturally the wish springs- up into words: " Oh, if 
I could only take you with me ! The country where I 
am going may be very bright ; the work that waits me 
there may be all-absorbing. I know that new friend- 
ships will be ready for me there; I know that it is bet- 
ter for you to tarry here. But just at this moment all 
that is overflowed by one desire that springs out of our 
affectionate companionship. I dread to be separated 
from you. Oh, that you might be with me where I 
am." Now the sublimity and the charm of the earthly 
life of Jesus consist in lai-ge part in the broad and 
healthy action of the simplest human powers which it 
exhibits. It is not in anything subtle or complicated. 
The simplest natures are the grandest natures always. 
The broad perception of principles, the hearty apprecia- 
tion of character, the strong feeling and frank utterance 
of emotion, — these are what ahvays mark the truly 
greatest men. And so it is a part of the greatness of 
Jesus that He so simply feels and utters this cordial 
human affection, and, as He looks round into the familiar 
faces of the twelve, says, " I dread to leave you behind 
me. I shall miss you. I wish you could go with me. 
I will that you should be with me where I am." We 
want not merely to admire this in Jesus ; not merely to 
feel its charm. We want to catch it from Him ; we want 
to let it reveal to us what the true dignity of human life 
is. Elaborate civilization is always making elaborate, 



Christ's wish for max. 301 

artificial standards. To be acute and subtle and skil- 
ful in some specialized working of the mind, to be secre- 
tive and ingenious, to admire nothing, and never to give 
way to the affections, — those are the dispositions which a 
complicated life is always setting up to make its modern 
man. Christ Jesus lets us see that the true nobility is a 
broad and sensitive nature, lying wide open to the influ- 
ences of God, easily feeling and frankly uttering the first 
true emotions. Let us try to catch the lesson and win 
something: of His unaffected breadth and truth. 

But now we go on farther. These primary emotions 
do exist in Jesus, the proof-marks of His true humanity, 
the patterns for all humanity ; but they are deeper and 
richer things in Him than in ordinary men, in propor- 
tion to the depth and richness of His human nature and 
the divinity that was mingled with it. This is what we 
are used to seeing. The same emotion exists in different 
men, but it becomes more full and perfect as the man 
is more and greater. The color deepens with the body 
and solidity of the material into which it is wrought. 
Fear is one thing for a coward who shakes at every trem- 
bling leaf, and another for a strong man who looks for- 
ward into the far consequences of things, and trembles at 
the unrelenting persistency with which a sin dogs the 
wrong-doer to his punishment. What a totally different 
thing scorn is in the feeble sneer of the cynic and in the 
lofty contempt which nobleness has for meanness. How 
sorrow deepens from the superficial grief of a superficial 
mourner at a funeral, all tears and crape, to the deep, si- 
lent woe that settles into the very centre of a strong, lov- 
ing character, and makes every day thenceforth, till death 
comes with its release, different from all the days that 



302 Christ's wish for man. 

went before. Nowhere is all this more true than about 
companionship. For two beings to be with one another 
always means the same simple thing, and yet its meaning 
runs up through all the ascending scale of human charac- 
ter. A herd of brutes are satisfied with a dim, brutish 
pleasure if they can feed in the same field ; and there 
is a human brutishness, an animal companionship even 
among men, which makes them like to be with one an- 
other, to sit in the same room, to walk in crowded streets. 
It is not bad ; it is healthy ; but it is not high. It is the 
companionship which is craved by the most superficial 
men, and by the most superficial part of all of us. Next 
higher than that, companionship means identity of work 
and occupation. To be with another man means to en- 
gage in the same tasks. This is the companionship of 
business men, of men of the same profession, when there 
is nothing more personal behind their professional rela- 
tion. Next higher still is the companionship of opinion, 
when men think alike and so are thrown into the advo- 
cacy of the same measures and policies. This is the es- 
sence of all partisanship, the association of men about 
a common thought, however different may be their rea- 
sons and their ways of thinking it. Beyond all these 
lies the highest companionship, which is companionship 
of character, a sympathy in the final purposes of life, a 
resemblance in fundamental qualities, which is so essen- 
tial that it may even do without the others, and m.ay ex- 
ist between those who are far apart in place, whose works 
are wholly different, and who hold very different opinions. 
These are the grades of human companionship : physical 
nearness, common employment, similar opinions, sympa- 
thy of character. According as the man mounts from 



CHRIST'S WISH FOR MAN. 303 

the lowest to the highest, to be with any fellow-man 
comes to signify to him successively one after another of 
these things. 

We have a fine illustration of the desire for this last 
and highest sort of companionship in the falnous words 
which St. Paul said to the governor, Agrippa, when he 
was on his trial before him. From the beginning of the 
interview we can see that Paul was attracted to Agrippa. 
Something about the manner of the magistrate pleased 
his prisoner. At last Paul is led on to express his feel- 
ing. "I would," he says, "that thou and all who hear 
me were altogether such as I am, except these bonds." 
Those words seem to be the echo of his Master's: "I 
will that they also whom Thou hast given me be with 
me where I am," Paul wanted Agrippa. From the dig- 
nity of his prisoner's stand, he yearned over that poor 
dissolute who was seated upon the throne. " I want 
you," he said ; " I want you to be with me ; with me not 
in place, not in these bonds, — I do not ask for that. Not 
in my work. Your work is different. I am a missionary 
and you are a king. More in opinions, though not prin- 
cipally in those, I want you to be with me. I want your 
companionship in character, and in the purposes of hfe." 
That was Paul's wish for his poor, kingly hearer. He 
himself was delighting in Christ. Truths which had 
made him another man, hopes that filled all his life with 
joy, a communion with God, rich, deep, and drowning 
every sorrow and provocation in its calm and mighty 
depths, a strength against temptation that filled him 
with hourly peace, — all these he had. In these he 
lived, and when he saw Agrippa living outside of all of 
them, he said, " I wish that you were liying here with 



304 Christ's wish for man. 

me." Ho added, for fear that they might misunderstand 
him, holding out his manacled hands, " not in these 
chains." But for himself the chains would not have oc- 
curred to him. It was not in them that he lived. He 
lived in the obedience and the communion and the peace 
of God. There was where he wanted Agrippa to come 
and be with him. 

And this must always be the first joy of any really 
good life, its first joy and its first anxiety at once, — the 
desire that others should enter into it. Indeed, here is 
the test of a man's life. Can you say, " I wish you were 
like me " ? Can you take your purposes and standards of 
living, and quietly, deliberately wish for all those who 
are dearest to you that they should be their purposes 
and standards too ? If you are a true Christian you can. 
If you are trying to serve Christ, however imperfect be 
your service, still you can say to your child, your friend, 
" I wish that you were with me where I am, on this good 
road of serving Christ, though far beyond me in it." But 
I am afraid that there are people here to-day whose lives 
could not begin to stand that test. I am afraid there are 
fathers and mothers here whose first and strongest prayer 
for their children would be that they might be saved 
from being what their parents are. You shut your char- 
acters away. With awkward hands you bring out virtues 
which you will not practise yourself, and put them before 
your children and say, " These are good. I advise you 
to practise these ; " but your own frivolity, your scepti- 
cism, your lust, the meanness that the years have brought 
you, the self-indulgence and the ignorance into which 
your life has fallen, these places where you live your- 
self, you do not want to have your children with you 



CHRIST'S WISH FOR MAN. 305 

there ; and so you never say anything of those places 
where you are most at home, and steal away to them 
when you think your children's pure eyes are not upon 
3'ou. Oh, what a condemnation of a man's life is that! 
It is not good for a man to be living any life which 
he would not desire to see made perfect and universal 
through the world. Paul says, "Be what I am;" but 
Dives cries out of the fire where he lies, " Oh, send and 
warn my seven brethren lest they come where I am ! " 
The dying Christian tells those beside him of the blessed- 
ness of serving Christ. The dying murderer with his 
last breath warns men from the scaffold not to be what 
he has been. Oh, test your lives thus ! Do not consent 
to be anything which you would not ask the soul that is 
dearest to you to be. Be nothing which you would not 
wish all the world to be ! 

Thus, then, we understand Christ's longing for the 
companionship of His disciples. He wanted them to be 
with Him. That wish of His must have run through all 
the scale of companionship which we have traced ; but it 
must have completed itself in the desire that they should 
be like Him, that they should have His character, that in 
the obedience and communion of God, where He abode, 
thoy should abide with Him. I do not think that we 
can tell how much it signifies, this wish of Jesus, in its 
lower meaning of physical companionship. I am sure it 
does mean something. I am sure that in the Bible some- 
thing is promised, some close, perpetual association of 
the souls of Christ's redeemed to Him, which, over 
and above the likeness whicli is to come between their 
souls and His, shall correspond in some celestial way to 
that close, visible, tangible propinquity with which they 

20 



306 Christ's wish for man. 

sat by one another at the table in the upper chamber. 
The " seeing His face," the " walking with Him in 
white," in heaven, are not wholly figures. What they 
mean those know to-day who through the lapsing years 
have gone from us, one by one, to be with Christ. But 
3^et God's guidance I doubt not it is which more and 
more in these days has drawn the minds of Christians to 
think of heaven less as a place than as a character. Cer- 
tainly one of the strongest characteristics of our time has 
been a sensible diminishing of the attempt to realize the 
blessedness of the occupations and the beauty of the 
landscapes of the other life, and an increase of the con- 
viction that the essence of its happiness must be in holi- 
ness, and that the soul consecrated to holiness might well 
forget even to ask where it was to dwell and what it was 
to do forever. What " place " may mean in that other life 
we cannot even conjecture till we know something of the 
nature of the spiritual body in wbich we are to live ; and, 
paint the place as definitely and as brilliantly as we will, 
still it would make it earth, not heaven, if it should be 
conceived of apart from spiritual fitnesses, as gratifying 
or satisfying the soul of its inhabitant. " Coelum patria, 
Christus via," says the old motto : " Heaven the coun- 
try, Christ the way." But it is true that He who is the 
way is also the life into which the way leads ; and Christ 
must be country as well as path. Much of the corruption 
of religion, the foul, bad lives into which men have fallen, 
while all the time they thought that they were living 
most religiously, have come just here. Men have thought 
that they could be with Christ without being in Christ ; 
that they cowld have His blessings and not share His 
character. Christ himself pictured the arrival of the de- 



^ 



CHRIST'S WISH FOR MAN. 307 

hided company at tlie gates of their misimagined heaven. 
" Master," they said, " we have eaten and drunk in Thy 
presence, and Thou hast taught in our streets." And 
then He answered them, " I never knew you. Depart 
from me, all ye workers of iniquity." Oh, my dear 
friends, let us beware of such delusion. Let us watch 
and guard against it. When is our Master's prayer ful- 
filled for us ? When are we with Jesus where He is ? 
Not when we say His name most loudly. Not when we 
crowd into the very centre of His church. Not when 
we come, if such a thing be possible, to some super- 
nal region where with new sort of visibility He walks 
among a people who see Him in the new as men once 
saw Him in the old Jerusalem. Never, never are we 
with Christ till we are like Him. Not till He is formed 
in us do we enter truly into Him. 

But let us look a little at the next clause of this verse 
of ours. It will carry out and make more forcible, I 
think, the thoughts on which we have been dwelling. 
Jesus says, " Father, 1 will that they also whom Thou 
hast given me be with me where I am ; that they may 
behold my glory." That is what He wants them to be 
with Him for : " that they may behold my glory." Per- 
haps it sounds to us a little strange at first. The words 
almost suggest the vulgar craving for display and admira- 
tion which is familiar enough to us among our ordinary 
fellow-men. The school-boy wants his school-fellow to 
come home with him that he may see the state in which 
his father lives. The American says to the foreigner, 
" Come, see our land, its vastness, its resources, its prog- 
ress." The Christian says, " Come to my church. You 
shall see how elaborately and tastefully we pray ; you 



308 CHRIST'S WISH FOR MAN. 

shall hear our music ; you shall admire our piety." And 
then comes the prayer of Jesus, '' Father, I want them 
to be with me, that they may see my glory." Before 
the words can be cut entirely free from low associations 
and soar into the high, pure meaning which belongs to 
them, we must remember what Christ's glory is which 
He wants us to see. Its essence, the heart and soul of 
it, must be His goodness. Again, what outward splendor 
may clothe Christ eternally we cannot know, in our deep 
ignorance of the very conditions of life in the spiritual 
world where He abides. But this we are sure of, that 
in at its very centre and heart the glory of God must is- 
sue from and consist in the goodness of God, not in His 
power. It is the very purpose of religion, it is the bat- 
tle that Christianity has been fighting with the stand- 
ards of the world for all these centuries, to make men 
know that power without goodness is not really glorious. 
And we must not apply to God a standard from which 
we are always trying to disenchant ourselves as concerns 
our fellow-men. In Him, too, nothing but goodness can 
be really glorious in the eyes of moral creatures. His 
power is the emphasis set upon His goodness ; the brill- 
iant light thrown through the perfect window, showing 
the window's glory, not its own. Other creations which 
are not moral, the brutes and the inanimate universe, 
may praise the glory of mere power. It is the preroga- 
tive of our morality that only in a moral character can 
it discover the glory that shall call out its fullest adora- 
tion. It is Christ's goodness, then, that He would have 
His people see. Think for a moment of what prospects 
that wish of our Lord opens. That we may see His 
goodness perfectly! Nowadays men are telling one an- 



Christ's wish for iMan. 309 

other how tired they are of seeing sin on evei-y side of 
them, — unrighteousness, impurity, corruption. " You 
cannot open your eyes," they say, " but one or the other 
of these things is staring you horribly in the face." We 
cheat ourselves if we think that it is peculiar to our 
times, for it has always been so. We cheat ourselves if 
we think that it is universal, for there is goodness, bright 
and glorious goodness, around us, mixed with the sin on 
every side. But yet there is unrighteousness enough to 
make our hearts sad and weary. I pity from my heart 
the man who, in the midst of the corruption all about 
him, has it not in his power to turn, and, for refreshment 
and relief, look at the goodness of Jesus Christ. There 
stands what we have searched for in vain. It rests and 
renews our failing courage, it makes us men again, 
wdth hope for humanity, when we turn and see His 
goodness. But how imperfectly we see it ! How much 
goodness there must be in Him which we do not see I 
For here this truth comes in, that in these moral things 
only the like can see its like ; only the good can really dis- 
cern, appreciate, and understand goodness. That needs 
no proof. We see it every day. Men live alongside 
of the best saints the world possesses, do business with 
them, pass their whole lives with them, and never know 
that they are good. If we have ever made any ad- 
vance in purity and unselfishness, has not the best of all 
its satisfaction been in this, that it has let us see some- 
thing new of the self-sacrifice and purity in other men 
which had been hidden from us. The higher we climb, 
the more the peaks open around us. Now apply all this 
to the Saviour's prayer that we may see His glory. His 
glory is His goodness. Only by growth in goodness can 



310 cheist's wish for man. 

His goodness open itself to us. What is He praying 
for then ? Is it not that which we traced before in the 
first part of His prayer, the same exactly, that we might 
be like Him? So only can we see Him. It is His glory 
that He wants us to see, but, back of that, He wants us 
to be such men and women that we can see His glory. 

I think of Jesus as He walked through Jerusalem. 
Men passed Him by ; some never looked at Him ; others 
just looked at Him, and sneered, and went their way. 
Do you think that did not give Him pain ? Surely it 
did. It stung Him deep with sorrow, that men would 
not understand Him. They could not see His glory. 
But was His pain for Himself ? Was it that His glory 
needed their recognition ? Was it not for them ? Was 
it not that He saw them incapable of apprehending Him ? 
Was it not over their low perceptions, their earthliness, 
their love of what was bad, their hate of what was good, 
that He lamented ? Was not this what He was really 
mourning for when He sat on the Mount of Olives, and 
looked down upon Jerusalem ? Not for Himself, but for 
the city which had rejected Him. Not, " Woe is me ! 
woe is me ! " but, " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! " 

Sometimes, my friends, in very far off way, it is given 
to a man to echo this experience of Jesus. Sometimes a 
man is pure, honest, just, living for the good of other 
people, and other people will not see it. He knows him- 
self; he is sure that no base motive mingles with the 
acts he does. But men fail to understand him, and he 
is left to sit upon the mountain and look down in sor- 
row upon the city which he longs to save. At such a 
time a man wants, and often enough he fails to get, the 
spirit of Christ's prayer. He wants men to " see His 



Christ's wish for man. 311 

glory," and they will not. Is it for himself or for them 
that he is disappointed ? Is it his dishonor or their 
blindness that stings him ? The man whom you helped 
yesterday and who ungratefully slanders you to-day, are 
you indignant about yourself or pitiful over him ? The 
man who is going up and down the town telling slanders 
about you, what is the feeling with which you upbraid 
his misrepresentation ? It is hard to keep out pride and 
jealousy, but if we ever find ourselves where anything 
like Christ's experience comes home to us, let us remem- 
ber how He wanted men to see Him because it was so 
wretched for them, not for Him, that they should be 
blind to Him ; in simple, manly honesty, let us try to 
make men see what we are doing, not because we are 
provoked at being misunderstood, but because it is not 
good for them not to be capable of seeing. 

I think then that we have reached the meaning of this 
prayer of Jesus ; and we are struck immediately by see- 
ing how it really is identical with all His prayers for 
men. In various words, under various figures, Christ is 
the intercessor, always offering prayers for men, but all 
His prayers resolve themselves into the same wish, all 
are asking for the one same thing. It is always that men 
might be saved from sin, that His goodness might come 
to us and we might be good. There is something very 
impressive, I think, about this, as it becomes more and 
more plain to us. I hear God at work everywhere on 
the lives of men. Wherever I go I hear men answering 
to some touch of His. They may not know that it is 
His touch which they are answering ; but one who be- 
lieves in Him knows that these things about us are not 
all doing themselves, but He does them. I pass one 



312 Christ's wish for man. 

man's door and laughter comes ringing out. God is send- 
ing joy into that house. I pass another, and I bear the 
sound of smothered sobs. God has sent pain, perliaps has 
sent death, there. One man is struggling with doubts 
which God has sent him. Another man is walking in 
the brightness of unclouded faith. Has God a hundred 
purposes for all these men ? Our truth to-day is that 
He has but one purpose for them all. Pie is trying to 
make these men true and holy. He is doing this for all 
of them, and He is doing nothing else save as a means to 
this for any of them. Men stumble so before they get 
hold of that truth. They complain that God does not do 
this and that and the other thing for them, which He 
never undertook to do. They say, " He does not make 
me rich. He does not fill my life with friendships." So 
they flutter about with their complainings as a bird will 
sweep this way and that, doubtful and wandering and 
tempted on every side. But as at last the bird catches 
sight of the home where it belongs, though very far away, 
and all its flutterings cease, and setting itself straight 
towards that, it steadies itself and seeks it without a 
single turn aside ; so by and by one of these wanderers 
among many hopes discovers far away the hope, the one 
only hope, for which God made him, and forgetting every- 
thing else thenceforth gives himself to that, to serve God 
and by serving Him to grow into His goodness. 

This was the prayer of Jesus, His only prayer, remem- 
ber! He asked His Father simply for this, that those 
whom He loved might come to Him in spiritual likeness. 
We use still, in our religious talk, the words which ex- 
press what Christ desired, but too often they have ac- 
quired some small meaning and degenerated into cant, 



Christ's wish for man. 313 

and lost the largeness and purity of meaning with which 
Jesus used them. We talk about a worldly man being 
"far from Christ." Men mean by that too often some- 
thing technical, something narrow ; the not having un- 
dertaken certain ceremonies, or passed through certain ex- 
periences. But how much the words really mean. What 
a terrible thing it is to be really " far from Christ." To 
be far from purity is to be impure. To be far from spir- 
ituality is to be sensual. To go away from the light is 
to go into the outer darkness. Not to be " with Him 
where He is," is to be away from Him where He is not, 
where sin is and the misery that belongs with sin. And 
then that other phrase, which we use so often : "Coming 
nearer and nearer to Christ," we say ; that does not mean 
creeping into a refuge where we can be safe. It means 
becoming better and better men ; repeating His charac- 
ter more and more in ours. The only true danger is sin, 
and so the only true safety is holiness. What a sub- 
lime ambition I How it takes our vague, half-felt wishes 
and fills them with reality and strength, when the moral 
growth, which makes a man complete, is put befoi'e us, 
not abstractly, but in this picture of the dearest and 
noblest being that our souls can dream of, standing be- 
fore us and saying to us, " Come unto me ; " standing 
over us and praying for us, " Father, bring them where 

am. 

That was Christ's prayer. He prayed it at the Pass- 
over table. The next day He prayed it in all the silent 
appeal of His suffering upon the Cross. "I, if I be lifted 
up, will draw all men unto me." The cross was Christ's 
supreme utterance of His longing that all men might be 
rescued out of sin and brought to holiness. As we stand 



314 Christ's wish for man. 

and see Him suffer, one thought, one cry alone arises in 
our hearts. Oh, how He must have wanted to save us ! 
How terrible sin must have seemed to Him ! How glori- 
ous holiness must have seemed, that such a prayer as 
this sacrifice of Himself should thus have gone up to God 
for our salvation ! 

Here let me close. It certainly would make it harder 
for us to do wrong this coming week, easier to do what is 
right, harder to be selfish, easier to be Christ-like, if this 
week we could constantly hear Christ praying for us that 
we might be with Him where He is. That prayer would 
draw us to Him, into His life, into His chai'acter, and 
make this week a foretaste of that eternity whose prom- 
ised glory is that there we are to be " forever with the 
Lord." 



XVIII. 

THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 
" Brethren, the time is short." — 1 Cor, vii. 29. 

The tone in which a man speaks often helps us to 
understand his meaning quite as much as the actual 
words he says. And with a great and sincere writer 
there is a tone in writing as well as in speaking, some- 
thing which gives an intonation to the words he writes, 
and lets us understand in which of several possible spirits 
he has written them. "Brethren, the time is short," 
writes St. Paul to the Corinthians, and there is no tre- 
mor of dismay or sadness in his voice. He was in the 
midst of work, full of the interest and joy of living, hold- 
ing the reins of many complicated labors in his hands, 
and he quietly said, " This is not going to last long. 
Very soon it will be over." It is what men often say 
to themselves with terror, clutching the things which 
they hold all the more closely, as if they would hold on 
to them forever. There is nothing of that about St. 
Paul. And on the other hand, there is nothing of mor- 
bidness or discontent, no rejoicing that the time is short, 
and wishing that it was still shorter. There is no hatred 
of life which makes him want to be away. There is no 
mad impatience for the things which lie beyond. There 
is simply a calm and satisfied recognition of a fact. 
There is a reasonable sense of what is good and dear in 



316 THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 

life, and yet, at the same time, of what must lie beyond 
life, of what life cannot give us. It is as when the same 
pen wrote those sublime and simple words, " This cor- 
ruptible must put on incorruption. This mortal must put 
on immortality ; " the quiet statement of a great, eternal 
necessity, at which the wise man must feel the same kind 
of serious joy as that with which he follows the move- 
ments of the stars, and looks to see day and night inevi- 
tably give place to one another. Or it is like that calm, 
majestic weighing of two worlds over against each other, 
and letting his will lie in even balance between them, 
cordially waiting the will of God, with which the same 
Paul wrote again, " I am in a strait betwixt two, having 
a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far 
better: nevertheless, to abide in the flesh is more needful 
for you : and having this confidence, I know that I shall 
abide." Or, again, it is like the healthy satisfaction of 
the healthy boy in his boyhood, knowing all the time the 
manhood that awaits him, feeling his boyhood pressed 
upon by it, hoping for it and expecting it, but living 
now in the concentrated happiness and work of the years 
whose activity and pleasure is all the more intense be- 
cause of the sense that it must end. 

It does not matter what St. Paul was thinking of when 
he said the time was short. He may have had his mind 
upon the death which they were all approaching. He 
may have thought of the coming of Christ, which he 
seems to have expected to take place while he was yet 
alive. I do not think we can be certain which it was. 
And perhaps the very vagueness about this helps us to 
his meaning. For he is not, evidently, dwelling upon the 
nature of the event which is to limit the " time," only 



THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 317 

upon the simple fact that there is a limit ; that the period 
of earthly life and work lies like an island in the midst 
of a greater sea of being, the island of time in the ocean 
of a timeless eternity ; and that it is pressed upon and 
crowded into littleness by the infinite. Not the shore 
where the sea sets the island its limits, but only the 
island in the sea, hearing the sea always on its shores ; 
not the experience by which this life should pass into an- 
other, but only the compression and intensifying of this 
life by the certainty that there is another ; not death, but 
the shortness of life — that is what his thoughts are fixed 
upon, and it is this of which the best men always think 
the most. 

Our theme is this, then — the shortness of human life. 
How old that theme is, how trite, and oftentimes how 
dreary. As we look back and listen we hear all the gen- 
erations wearisomely wasting their little span of life in 
doleful lamentations that it is not longer. Trite lessons 
which nobody loves to learn ; dull poems which no man 
can sing ; efforts at resignation which do not succeed, — 
these are what come flocking up about the truth that 
life is short. It is the ghost at the banquet of human 
thouglit. It is the monotonous, miserable undertone that 
haunts all the bustle and clatter of men's work and all 
the gay music of their pleasure-making. I wish that I 
could read its truth to you in another tone and paint its 
picture in another color. I wish that I could make you 
hear it, as it seems as if Paul's Corinthians must have 
lieard it, almost like a trumpet, — a call to work and joy. 
If we can catch his spirit at all, something of that may 
certainly be possible. 

And first, then, let us ask, WTiat is the shortness of 



318 THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 

life ? What do we mean by life's being short ? There 
is a little insect that crawls upon the trees, and creeps, in 
one short day of ours, through all the experiences of life 
from birth to death. In a short twenty-four hours his 
life begins, matures, and ends, • — birth, youth, activity, 
age, decrepitude, all crowded and compressed into these 
moments that slip away uncounted in one day of our hu- 
man life. Is his life long or short ? Is our life long or 
short to him ? If he could realize it by any struggle of 
his insect brain, what an eternity our threescore years 
and ten must seem to him ! And then lift up your eyes, 
lift up your thoughts, and think of God. What look has 
an}^ life that has any limits to Him ? Nothing short of 
eternity can seem long to Him. He sees the infant's 
life flash like a ripple into the sunlight of existence and 
vanish almost before the eye has caught it. And He 
sees Methuselah's slow existence creep through its nine 
hundred and sixty-nine years, and find, at last, the grave 
which had stood waiting so long. Is there a real differ- 
ence in the length of these two lives to Him ? A little 
longer ripple is the life of the patriarch than was the 
life of the baby, that is all. And what do we mean then 
by the shortness of our human life ? To the ephemera 
it looks like an eternity ; to God it looks like an instant. 
Evidently these attributes of length and shortness must 
be relative ; they are not absolute. How shall human 
life seem then to man ? Must it not depend altogether 
upon where he stands to look at it ? If he stands with 
the ephemera, his life looks long to him. If he stands 
with God, his life looks short to him. If a man is 
able, that is, to conceive of immortality ; if he can 
picture to himself a being who can live forever ; if he 



THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. , 319 

recognizes in himself any powers which can outlast and 
laugh at death, — then ECny limit of life must seem nar- 
row; against the broad background of the whole, any 
part must seem small. On the blue sky the almost mill- 
ion miles of the sun's breadth seem narrow. It is here 
that the truth about the matter lies. It is only by the 
dim sense of his immortality, only by the divine sight of 
himself as a being capable of long, long life, that man 
thinks his life on earth is short. Only by losing that 
divine sight of himself, and looking at himself as the 
beasts look at themselves, can he come to think his life 
ions:. The beast's life never seems short to him. Think 
of yourself as a beast and your life will never seem short 
to you. It is the divine consciousness in man, the con- 
sciousness that he is a child of God, that makes him 
know he is short-lived. Human life is not long or short, 
absolutely. It seems short to us because the conscious- 
ness of immortality is in us. What then ? It could not 
seem long unless we threw that consciousness away. 
That we can count it short, then, is the pledge and wit- 
ness of our nobility. The man who died among us yes- 
terday, oh, realize, my friends, that the very fact that his 
life could seem to you, as you stood by his coffin, to have 
been very short, is a sign that you have been able to con- 
ceive of his humanity and yours being immortal. Feel 
this, and is not the shortness of life the crown and glory 
of our race ? 

And again, we all know how the shortness of life 
is bound up with its fullness. It is to him who is most 
active, always thinking, feeling, working, caring for people 
and for things, that life seems short. Strip a life empty 
and it will seem long enough. The day crawls to tlie 



320 THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 

idler, and flies to the busy worker. That is the common- 
place of living. The shortness of life is closely associ- 
ated, not merely with the great hopes of the future, but 
with the real vitality of the present. What then? If 
you and I complain how short life is, how quick it flies 
through the grasp with which we try to hold it, we are 
complaining of that which is the necessary consequence 
of our vitality. You can make life long only by making 
it slow ; and if you want to make it slow I should think 
that there were men enough in town who could tell you 
how ; men with idle hands and brains, who seem to have 
so much trouble to get through life as it is that we can- 
not imagine that they really wish that there were more 
of it. 

And tell me, then, does not the shortness of life cease 
to be our sorrow and lamentation ; does it not become our 
crown and privilege and glory, when we see that life is 
short to us because we are, that life is short to us just in 
proportion as we are, conscious of immortality and full of 
vitality ? Who would not dread to have his life begin 
to seem long? Who would not feel that he was losing 
the proof-marks of his best humanity, forgetting that he 
was immortal and ceasing to be thoroughly alive ? 

But let us leave this and go further on. Suppose a 
man, with more or less of struggle, with what grace he 
can, has accepted the shortness of life as a conviction. He 
knows it. It has been forced upon him by some special 
shock, or it has been pressed into him by his gradual ex- 
perience, the certainty that life is short, that he is not 
to be, cannot be, a long time here on the earth. What 
effect will that conviction have upon his life ? What ef- 
fect ought it to have ? Evidently it ought to go deeper 



THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 321 

than his spirits. It ought to do something more than 
make him glad or sorry. It ought to have some effect 
upon his conduct and his character. I should like to sug- 
gest to you in several particulars what it seems to me 
that that effect will be. 

1. And first of all must it not make a man try to sift 
the things that offer themselves to him, and try to find 
out what his things are? The indiscriminateness of most 
men's lives impresses us, I think, more and more. The 
old Greek Epictetus said that for each of men there is 
one great classification of the universe, into the things 
which concern him and the things which do not concern 
him. To how many men that classification is all vague. 
Many men's souls are like omnibuses, stopping to take 
up every interest or task that holds up its finger and beck- 
ons them from the sidewalk. So many men a-re satisfied 
with asking themselves vague questions about whether 
this thing or that thing is wrong, as if whatever they 
could not pronounce to be absolutely wrong for every 
man to do was right for them to do. So many men seem 
to think it enough that they should see no good reason 
for not doing a thing, in order to justify their doing it. 
As if the absence of any reason why they should do it 
were not reason enough why they should not do it. 
Such indiscriminateness would be inevitable, you could 
not hope to control it, if life were indefinitely long. Such 
indiscriminateness is almost legitimate and necessary in 
childhood, in the beginning, the freshman year of life. 
Then life seems endless. Then the quick experimenting 
senses are ready for whatever strikes them. But as the 
course goes on, as its limit comes in sight and we see how 

short it is, the elective system must come in. Out of the 

21 



322 THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE, 

mass of things which we have touched, we must choose 
these which are ours, — the books which we shall read, 
the men whom we shall know, the power that we shall 
wield, the pleasure which we shall enjoy, the special 
point where we shall drop our bit of usefulness into the 
world's life before we go. We come to be like a party 
of travellers left at a great city railway station for a 
couple of hours. All cannot see everything in town. 
Each has to choose according to his tastes what he will 
see. They separate into their individualities instead of 
going wandering about promiscuously, as they would if 
there were no limit to their time. So conscientiousness, 
self-knowledge, independence, and the toleration of other 
men's freedom which always goes with the most serious 
and deep assertion of our own freedom are closely con- 
nected with the sense that life is very short. 

2. But again, besides this discrimination of the things 
with which we ought to deal, the sense of the shortness 
of life also brings a power of freedom in dealing with the 
things which we do take to be our own. This, I think, 
is what St. Paul is speaking of in the words which are 
in close connection with this text of ours. "Brethren, 
the time is short," he says; " it remainetli that both they 
that have wives be as though they had none ; and they 
that weep as though they wept not ; and they that rejoice 
as though they rejoiced not ; and they that buy as though 
they possessed not ; and they that use this world as not 
abusing it : for the fashion of this world passeth away." 
Not that they should not marry, or weep, or rejoice, or 
bu}', or use the world. The shortness of life was not to 
paralyze life like that. But they were to do these things 
as if they did them not. They were to do them with a 



THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 323 

soul above their details, and in the principles, reasons, and 
motives which lay beyond them. To take once more the 
illustration of the travellers : he who has only an hour to 
stay in some great foreign city will not puzzle and bur- 
den himself with all the intricacies of its streets or all 
the small particulars of its life. He will try, if he is 
wise, simply to catch its general spirit, to see what sort 
of town it is and learn its lessons. He must tread its 
pavements, ride in its carriages, talk with its people ; but 
he will not do these things as the citizens do them ; he 
will not be fastidious about them ; he will hold them very 
loosely, only trying to make each of them give him what 
help it can towards the understanding of the city. He 
will do them as if he did them not. Is not that the 
idea ? Just so he who knows he is in the world for a 
very little while, who knows it and feels it, is not like a 
man who is to live here forever. He strikes for the 
centre of living. He cares for the principles and not for 
the forms of life. He does the little daily things of life, 
but he does them for their purposes, not for themselves. 
He is like a climber on a rocky pathway, who sets his 
foot upon each projecting point of stone, but who treads 
on each, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the ones 
above it. The man who knows he is to die to-morrow 
does all the acts of to-day, but does them as if he did 
not do them, does tliem freely, cannot be a slave to tlieir 
details, has entered already into something of the large 
liberty of death. That is the way in which the sense 
that life is short liberates a man from the slavery of de- 
tails. You say, perhaps, " That is not good. No man can 
do his work well unless his heart is in it." But is it not 
also true that a man's heart can really be only in the 



324 THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 

heart of his work, and that the most conscientious faith- 
fuhiess in details will always belong to the man, not who 
serves the details, but who serves the idea of the work 
which he has to do ? He who holds that the " fashion of 
this world passeth away" will live in the fashion still as a 
present means of working, but will get a great deal more 
out of it, because he holds it a great deal more loosely 
than the man who treats it as if it were to last forever. 
Through the freer use of the fashion which passeth away 
he will come to the substance which cannot pass away, — 
the love of God, the life and character of man. 

3. Closely connected with this is another idea, which 
is that in the shortness of life the great emotions and 
experiences by which the human character is ruled and 
shaped assume their lai'gest power and act with their 
most ennobling influence. Every emotion which a man 
can feel, every experience which a man can undergo, has 
its little form and its great form. Happiness is either a 
satisfaction that the cushions are soft and the skies clear, 
or a sublime content in harmony with the good uni- 
verse of God. Love is either a whim of the eyes, or a 
devotion and consecration of the soul. Self-confidence is 
either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or a realiza- 
tion of our duty and privilege as one of God's children. 
Hope is either a petty wilfulness, or a deep and thought- 
ful insight. Trust is either laziness or love. Fear is 
either a fright of the nerves, or the solemn sense of the 
continuousness and necessary responsibility of life. And 
grief is either the wrench of a broken habit, or the agony 
of a wrung soul. So every emotion has its higher and 
its lower forms. It means but little to me if I know 
only that a man is happy or unhappy, if I do not know 



THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 325 

of what sort his joy or sorrow is. But all the emotions 
are certainly tempted to larger action if it is realized 
that the world in which they take their birth is but for 
a little time, that its fashion passes away, that the cir- 
cumstances of an experience are very transitory. That 
must drive me down into the essence of every experi- 
ence and make me realize it in the profoundest and the 
largest way. Take, for instance, one experience. Think 
of deep sori'ow coming to a man, something which breaks 
his home and heart by taking suddenly, or slowly, out of 
them that which is the centre of them both, some life 
around which all his life has lived. There are two forms 
in which the sorrow of that death comes to a man. One 
is in the change of circumstances, the breaking up of 
sweet companionships and pleasant habits, the loneliness 
and weariness of living ; the other is in the solemn brood- 
ing of mystery over the soul and the tumult of love 
within the soul, the mystery of death, the distress of love. 
Now if the man who is -bereaved sees nothing in the dis- 
tance, as he looks forward, but one stretch of living, if he 
realizes most how long life is, it is the first of these as- 
pects of his sorrow that is the most real to him. He 
multiplies the circumstances of his bereavement into all 
these coming years. Year after year, year after year, he 
is to live alone. But if, as it so often happens when death 
comes very near to us, life seems a very little thing ; if, 
when we stand to watch the spirit which has gone away 
from earth to heaven, the years of earth which we have 
yet to live seem very few and short ; if it seems but a 
very little time before we shall go, too, then our grief is 
exalted to its largest form. It grows unselfish. It is 
perfectly consistent with a triumphant thankfulness for 



326 THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 

the dear soul that has entered into rest and glory. It 
dwells not on the circumstances of bei*eavenient, but 
upon that mysterious strain in which love has been 
stretched from this world to the other, and, amid all the 
pain that the tension brings, is still aware of joy at the 
new knowledge of its own capacities which has been 
given it. Ah, you must all know, you must all have 
seen, that men's griefs are as different as men's lives 
are. To the man who is all wrapt up in this world, 
grief comes as the ghosts come to the poor narrow-minded 
churl, — to plague and tease him, to disturb the circum- 
stances and habits of his living, to pull down his fences 
and make strange, frightful noises in his quiet rooms. 
All is petty. To him to whom life is but an episode, 
a short stage in the existence of eternity, who is always 
cognizant of the great surrounding world of mystery, 
grief comes as angels came to the tent of Abraham. 
Laughter is hushed before them. The mere frolic of 
life stands still, but the soul takes the grief in as a guest, 
meets it at the door, kisses its hand, washes its travel- 
stained feet, spreads its table with the best food, gives it 
the seat by the fireside, and listens reverently for what 
it has to say about the God from whom it came. So 
different are the sorrows that come to two men which 
seem just the same. So is every emotion great or little, 
according to the life in which it finds its play. It must 
find earth too small for it, and open eternity to itself, or 
it spreads itself out thin and grows petty. I beg you, 
if God sends you grief, to take it largely by letting it 
first of all show you how short life is, and then prophesy 
eternity. Such is the grief of which the poet sings so 
noblv, — 



THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 327 

" Grief should be 
Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate ; 
Confirming, clecansing, raising, making free ; 
Strong to consume small troubles ; to commend 
Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end." 

But grief, to be all tliat, must see the end; must bring 
and forever keep with its pain such a sense of the short- 
ness of life that the pain shall seem but a temporary ac- 
cident, and that all that is to stay forever after the pain 
has ceased, the exaltation, the unselfishness, the mystery, 
the nearness to God, shall seem to be the substance of the 
sorrow. 

4. But let me hasten on and name another power 
which seems to be bound up with the perception of the 
shortness of life. I mean the criticalness of life. All 
men who have believed at all that there was another life, 
have held in some Avay that this life was critical. Some 
have held absolutely that probation wholly stopped when 
this life ended, and that as the man was when he died, so 
he was certainly to be forever and ever. Others have 
only felt that such a change as death involves must have 
some mighty power to fasten character, and so to fasten 
destiny, and that the soul, living in any unknown world, 
must carry forever, deep in its nature and its fortunes, 
the marks and consequences of what it has been here. 
That thought of criticalness belongs to every limited pe- 
riod of being which opens into something greater. A 
boy feels the probation character of his youth, feels that 
he is making manhood, just in proportion as he vividly 
realizes the approach of his majority. And man is made 
so that some sense of criticalness is necessary to the most 
vigorous and best life always. Let me feel that nothing 
but this moment depends upon this moment's action, and 



328 THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 

I am very apt to let this moment act pretty much as it 
will. Let me see the spirits of the moments yet unborn 
standing and watching it anxiously, and I must watch it 
also for their sakes. And it is in this general sense of 
probation, or of criticalness, this sense that no moment 
livetli or dieth to itself ; it is in this, not stated as a doc- 
trine, but spread out as a great pervading coiigciousness 
all through life , it is in this that the strongest moral 
power of life is found. Now ask yourself: Could this 
have been if life had been so long, if life had seemed so 
long to men, as never to suggest its limits ? It is when 
the brook begins to hear the great river calling it, and 
knows that its time is short, that it begins to hurry over 
the rocks and toss its foam into the air and make straight 
for the valley. Life that never thinks of its end lives 
in a present and loses the flow and movement of respon- 
sibility. It is not so much that the shortness of life 
makes us prepare for death, as it is that it spreads the 
feeling of criticalness all through life, and makes each 
moment prepare for the next, makes life prepare for life. 
This is its power. Blessed is he who feels it. Blessed 
is he in whose experience each day and each hour has all 
the happiness and all the solemnity of a parent towards 
the day and the hour to which it gives birth, stands 
sponsor for it, holds it for baptism at the font of God. 
Such days are sacred in each other's eyes. The life in 
which such days succeed each other is a holy family with 
its moments " bound each to each by natural piety." 

5. I take one moment only to suggest one more con- 
sequence which comes from the sense of how short life is. 
I mean the feeling that it gives us towards our fellow- 
men. Do vou not know that when vour time of inter- 



THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 320 

course is short with any man, your relations with that 
man grow true and deep ? Two men who have lived 
side by side for years, with business and social life be- 
tween them, with a multitude of suspicions and conceal- 
ments, let them know that they have only an hour more 
to live together, and, as they look into each other's eyes, 
do not the suspicions and concealments clear away ? 
They know each other. They trust each other. They 
think the best of each other. They are ready to do all 
that they can do for each other in those few moments 
that remain. Oh, my dear friends, you who are letting 
miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, 
meaning to clear them up some day ; you who are keeping 
wretched quarrels alive because you cannot quite make up 
your mind that now is the day to sacrifice your pride and 
kill them ; you who ai'e passing men sullenly upon the 
street, not speaking to them out of some silly spite, and 
yet knowing that it would fill you with shame and re- 
morse if you heard that one of those men were dead to- 
morrow morning ; you who are letting your neighbor 
starve, till you hear that he is dying of starvation ; or let- 
ting your friend's heart ache for a word of appreciation or 
sympathy, which you mean to give him some day, — if 
you only could know and see and feel, all of a sudden, that 
"the time is short," how it would break the spell! How 
you would go instantly and do the thing which you migiit 
never have another chance to do. What a day of friend- 
liness, of brotherliness, of reconciliations, of help, the last 
day of the world will be, if men shall know how near the 
awful end is ! But need we wait for that? Cannot the 
men and women whom we live with now be sacred to us 
by the knowledge of what wonderful, mysterious ground it 



330 THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 

is that we are walking together, here in this narrow hu- 
man life, close on the borders of eternity ? 

" Brethren, the time is short." There is the fact, then, 
forever pressing on us, and these are the consequences 
which it ought to bring to those who feel its pressure. 
Behold, it is no dreary shadow hanging above our heads 
and shutting out the sunshine. It is an everlasting in- 
spiration. It makes a man know himself and his career. 
It makes him put his heart into the heart of the career 
which he knows to be his. It makes the emotions and 
experiences of life great and not petty to him. It makes 
life solemn and interesting with criticalness ; and it makes 
friendship magnanimous, and the desire to help our fel- 
low-men real and energetic. It concentrates and in- 
vigorates our lives. In the brightest, freshest, clearest 
mornings, it comes to us not as a cloud, not as a paraly- 
sis, but as a new brightness in the sunshine and a new 
vigor in the arm. " Brethren, the time is short." Only 
remember the shortness of life is not a reality to us, ex- 
cept as it shows itself against a true realization of eter- 
nity. Life is long to any man, however he mourns over 
its shortness, to whom life is a whole. Life as a part, life 
set upon the background of eternity, life recognized as 
the temporary form of that whose substance is everlast- 
ing, that is short ; we wait for, we expect its end. And 
remember that to the Christian the interpretation of all 
this is in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. " I am He that 
liveth, and was dead ; and behold, I am alive for evermore." 
The earthly life set against the eternal life, the incorpo- 
rate earthly form uttering here for a time the everlasting 
and essential being, those years shut in out of the eterni- 
ties between the birth and the ascension, that resurrection 



THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 331 

opening tbe prospect of the life that never was to end, — 
these are the never-failing interpretation to the man who 
believes in them of the temporal and eternal in his own 
experience. Christ comes and puts His essential life into 
our human form. In that form He claims the truest 
brotherhood with us. He shares our lot. He binds His 
life with ours so that they never can be separated. What 
He is we must be ; what we are He must be forever. 
Finally, by the cross of love, He, entering into our death, 
takes us completely into His life. And when He had done 
all this He rose. Out of His tomb, standing there among 
human tombs, He comes, and lo, before Him there rolls 
on the unbroken endlessness of Being. And not before 
Him alone, — before those also whom He had taken so 
completely to Himself. His resurrection makes our res- 
urrection sure. Our earthly life, Hke His, becomes an 
episode, a short, special, temporary thing, when it is seen 
like His against an immortality. 

So the Incarnation is the perpetual interpretation of 
our life. Jesus cries, " It is finished," on His cross, and 
at once it is evident that that finishing is but a begin- 
ning ; that it is a breaking to pieces of the temporal, that 
it may be lost in the eternal ! That cross is the perpet- 
ual glorification of the shortness of life. In its light we, 
too, can stand by the departing form of our own life, or of 
some brother's life, and say, " It is finished," and know 
that the finishing is really a beginning. The temporary 
is melting away like a cloud in the sky, that the great 
total sky may all be seen. The form in which the man 
has lived is decaying, that the real life of the man nuiy 
be apparent. The fashion of this world is passing away; 
the episode, the accident of earth is over, that the spirit- 



332 THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE, 

ual reality may be clear. It is in the light of the cross 
that the exquisite picture of Shelley, who tried so hard to 
be heathen and would still be Christian in his own des- 
pite, is really realized, — 

" The one remains, the many change and pass ; 

Heaven's light forever shines ; earth's shadows fly ; 
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of eternity. 
Until death tramples it to fragments." 

And so what is there to be done ? What could be 
clearer ? Only to him who realizes eternity does the 
short human life really seem short and give out of its 
shortness its true solemnity and blessing. It is only by 
binding myself to eternity that I can know the shortness 
of time. But how shall I bind myself to eternity except 
by giving myself to Him who is eternal in obedient love ? 
Obedient love ! Loving obedience ! That is what binds 
the soul of the less to the soul of the greater everywhere. 
I give myself to the eternal Christ, and in His eternity I 
find my own. In His service I am bound to Him, and 
the shortness of that life, whose limitations in any way 
shut me out from Him, becomes an inspiration, not a bur- 
den to me. Oh, my dear friends, you who with Ciiris- 
tian faith have seen a Christian die, tell me was not this 
short life then revealed to you in all its beauty ? Did 
you not see completely that no life was too long which 
Christ had filled with the gift and knowledge of Himself; 
no life was too short which departed from the earth only 
to go and be with Him in Heaven forever? 

My dear friends, let us think how solemn, hoAV beauti- 
ful, the thought of dedication to Christ becomes, when 
through His voice which calls us sounds the warning 



THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE. 333 

and inspiring cry of His disciple, " Brethren, the time is 
short." There is no time to waste of what belongs en- 
tirely to Him. " The time is short." Take your place 
now. Bind yourself now in with the fortunes of those 
who are trying to serve Him. This Christian Church 
which we see here is only the beginning. This poor, 
stained, feeble church of earth is only the germ and prom- 
ise of the great Church of Heaven, and we who are trying 
to serve Him together now have a right to take courage 
from the promise of the Master, who has overcome, " Him 
that overcometh I will make a pillar in the temple of my 
God, and He shall go no more out." 



XIX. 

HUMILITY. 

" And be clothed with humility." — 1 Peter v. 5. 

We are thinking, during Lent, about the duty of being 
humble. But what a poor thing we make out of humility. 
What a fiction it is apt to be with us. How artificial 
we are apt to make it. We reduce it to a few observ- 
ances. We try to cultivate it from outside. At most we 
try to school ourselves into certan feelings, making our- 
selves think about certain things until we reach a certain 
emotional condition, and we call that humility ; but hu- 
mility not as an action, not as a sentiment, but as an 
abiding character, out of which all actions should flow 
in one direction, from which all sentiments should rise, 
cloud-like, with one color, — this we hardly conceive of, 
and to seek after it hardly enters into our thoughts. 

Let us look, then, at humility a little while, and see if 
we cannot get some deeper and truer notions about what 
it really is, and where it really comes from. It is not 
well to use the word, and praise the grace, and yet be all 
the while mistaking what it is that we name and praise. 

The word itself and its history are interesting. " There 
are cases," says Coleridge, "in which more knowledge, of 
more value, may be conveyed by the history of a word 
than by the history of a campaign." You can often 
trace a word down the generations and judge of the char- 



HUMILITY. ■ 335 

acter of each period by seeing whether the word was pop- 
ular or unpopular, whether it was a title of dishonor or 
of honor in each successive age ; just as, if you could send 
a great warrior or a great thinker or a great saint, a 
Caesar or a Bacon or a St. John, from age to age and 
country to country, and could see how every age and 
country regarded Him, you would have a test of the 
character of every land and time. It is true of the ca- 
reers of the best words, as Jesus said it was to be of the 
progress of His disciples, that "he that receiveth you 
receiveth me." The best and noblest words are really 
the judges of the people, who pronounce on their own 
moral condition as they speak them with affection or dis- 
like. 

Now take this word humility. It was not a new word 
when the New Testament was written. It, or its Greek 
equivalent, was very common. It had been used for 
years. Only it is striking that almost without exception 
the word humility, used before the time of Christ, is 
used contemptuously and rebukingly. It always meant 
meanness of spirit. To be humble was to be a coward. 
It described a ci'inging soul. It was a word of slaves. 
Such is its almost constant classic use. 

Where could we find a more striking instance of the 
change that the Christian religion brought into the world, 
than in the way in which it took this disagraceful word 
and made it honorable. To be humble is to have a low 
estimation of one's self. That was considered shameful 
in the olden time. Nobody claimed it for himself. No- 
body enjoined it upon another. You insulted a man if 
you called him humble. It seemed to be inconsistent 
with that self-respect which is necessary to any good ac- 



336 HUMILITY. 

tivity. Christ came and made the despised quality the 
crowning grace of the culture that He inaugurated. Lo ! 
the disgraceful word became the key-word of His fullest 
gospel. He redeemed the quality, and straightway the 
name became honorable. It became the ambition of all 
men to wear it. To call a man humble was to praise 
him now. Men affected it if they did not have it. Pride 
began to ape humility when humility was made the 
crowning grace of human life. 

It is in moral changes such as these, in alterations of 
the standards and aspirations of the race, that the rev- 
olutionary power of Christianity is really shown, far more 
than in external changes, the progress of civilization, the 
reshaping of empires. Think what the change must have 
been. Think with what indignation and contempt men 
of the old school in Rome and Athens must have seen 
mean-sj)iritedness, as they called it, taken up, inculcated 
and honored, proclaimed as the salvation of the world, 
and Him in whom it was most signally embodied made 
the Saviour and King of men. Ah, it seems to me more 
and more that it must have been very hard for those 
early disciples to have believed in Christ. 

But let us see, if we can, what the change was that 
Christianity accomplished, and how it came about. The 
quality that Christianity rescued and glorified was hu- 
mility. Humility means a low estimate or value of one's 
self. But all values are relative. The estimate we set 
on anything depends of course on the standard with 
which we compare it. You cannot tell how big anything 
is, unless you compare it with something else, and so 
values are always varying as the standards or the objects 
with which you compare the thing that you are valuing 



HUMILITY. 337 

change. Your boy of twelve plays with his little broth- 
ers of three or four, and seems to them a giant and a sage ; 
then he goes and sits among his teachers, and is forth- 
with a child again. Everything depends for its value on 
the standards with which you compare it. The silver 
is precious till you find the gold, the gold until you find 
the diamond. 

Now Christianity's great primary revelation was God. 
Much about Him it showed men ; but first of all it 
showed them Him. He, the Creator, the Governor, be- 
came a presence clear and plain before men's hearts. His 
greatness, His holiness, His love, — nay, we cannot de- 
scribe Him by His qualities, for He is greater than them 
all, — He, by the marvellous method of the Incarnation, 
showed himself to man. He stood beside man's work. 
He towered above and folded Himself about man's life. 
He entered into men's closets and took possession of 
men's hearts. And what then ? God in the world must 
be the standard of the world. Greatness meant some- 
thing different when men had seen how great He was, 
and the manhood which had compared itself with lesser 
men and grown proud now had a chance to match itself 
with God, and to see how small it was and to grow 
humble about itself. 

We are not dealing only with history ; we are not talk- 
ing only about what happened eighteen hundred years 
ago. A man is living a pagan life here, now, among us. 
Wherever he goes he meets men whom he measures him- 
self against, and finds that he surpasses them. He is the 
strongest man in the wrestle of business, the quickest man 
at a bargain, the wittiest man at an argument. Now that 
man cannot be humble. He overtops his little world and 
aa 



338 HumLiTY. 

he must think himself high. The White Mountains have 
never seen the Alps, and Mount Washington and Mount 
Jefferson, looking down on their lower peaks, must think 
they are the summits of the world. It is strange how 
small men can make their world, so that the petty su- 
premacy of a school-room or a shop counter is enough 
to kill out humility. Now, if such a man comes among 
other men better and greater than himself, he does, per- 
haps, learn what it is to be humble. Only our pride is 
very ingenious, and we are very quick to find some point 
in which the greatest of our superiors is worse off than 
we are, and to hide our imperilled self-satisfaction there. 
" Yes," we say, " he knows a hundred times as much, and 
is a hundred times as generous as I, but he has not my 
good taste, or he cannot coin money as I can." It is won- 
derful how the smallest man can keep his self-compla- 
cency in the presence of the largest. So many of us have 
some one pet point in which we really believe that we sur- 
pass almost every one we meet. But let that small man 
become a Christian. That means, let the narrow walls of 
his life be broken down and let him see God, present 
here by Christ. At once then is all changed. It is as if 
you took the brown rugged hill and towered up into the 
sky above it the white, straight, topless alpine mountain. 
All question of feet and inches disappears, and in the 
consciousness of its littleness that which had counted itself 
great does homage to the truly great which it has found. 
This is the meaning of whatever sense of his own lit- 
tleness comes into a man's life when he is made a Chris- 
tian. I think it is terrible to consider what a fearful 
thing it would be if the only thing that Christ showed us 
of God were His greatness. The pure humiliation would 



HUIDLITY. 339 

be too crushing. Just imagine that when yon and I wore 
going on learning our lessons, doing our work, exercising 
our skill here on the earth and proud of our knowledge. 
our strength, and our skill, just suppose that suddenly 
Omniscience towered up above our knowledge, and Om- 
nipotence above our strength, and the Infinite Wisdom 
stood piercing out of the sight of our ignorant and baffled 
skill. Must it not crush the man with an utter insignifi- 
cance? What is the use of heaving up these mole-hills 
so laboriously close by the gigantic mountain-side ? But 
if the revelation is not only this ; if it includes not only 
the greatness but the love of God ; if the majesty that 
is shown to us is the majesty of a father, which takes 
our littleness into its greatness, makes it part of itself, 
honors it, trains it, does not mock it, then there comes 
the true graciousness of humility. It is not less humble, 
but it is not crushed. It is not paralyzed, but stimulated. 
The energy which the man used to get out of his estimate 
of his own greatness he gets now out of the sight of His 
Father's, which yet is so near to hira that, in some finer 
and higher sense, it still is his ; and so he is more hopeful 
and happy and eager in his humility than he ever used 
to be in his pride. This is the philosophy of reverence 
and humility as enrichers of life and main-springs of ac- 
tivity. 

There is nothing so bad for man or woman as to live 
always with their inferiors. It is a truth so important 
that one might well wish to turn aside a moment and 
urge it, even in its lower aspects, upon the young people 
who are just making their associations and friendships. 
Many a temptation of laziness or pride induces us to 
draw towards those who do not know as nnich or are not 



340 HUMILITY. 

in some way as strong as we are. It is a smaller tax 
upon our powers to be in their society. But it is bad for 
us. I am sure that I have known men, intellectually and 
morally very strong, the whole development of whose in- 
tellectual and moral life has suffered and been dwarfed, 
because they have only accompanied with their inferiors, 
because they have not lived with men greater than them- 
selves. Whatever else they lose, they surely must lose 
some culture of humility. If I could choose a young man's 
companions, some should be weaker than himself, that 
he might learn patience and charity ; many should be as 
neai'ly as possible his equals, that he might have the full 
freedom of friendship ; but most should be stronger than 
he was, that he might forever be thinking humbly of 
himself and be tempted to higher things. And this prin- 
ciple, which is surely the true one in the associations of 
men with one another, is elevated to its perfect applica- 
tion when we think of man humbled and incited by the 
constant presence of God manifest both as majesty and 
love in Christ. 

It was not strange that humility should be contemp- 
tible as long as and where the presence of God was very 
little real. The only way for men to be humble then 
was for them to stoop until they were lower than some- 
thing than which they were made to be taller. But 
when Christ showed us God, then man had only to stand 
at his highest and look up to the Infinite above him to 
see how small he was. And, always, the true way to be 
humble is not to stoop till you are smaller than yourself, 
but to stand at your real height against some higher nat- 
ure that shall show you what the real smallness of your 
greatest greatness is. The first is the unreal humility 



HUMILITY. 341 

that always goes about depreciating human nature ; the 
second is the genuine humility that always stands in loVe 
and adoration, glorifying God. 

2. This is one, then, of the ways in which Christ res- 
cued and exalted humility. He gave man his true stand- 
ard. He set man's littleness against the infinite height 
of God. The next way that I want to speak of is even 
more remarkable. He asserted and magnified the essen- 
tial glory of humanity. Remember, always, when you 
say that Christ convicted man of sin, that, nevertheless, 
true as that is, there never was any life that so superbly 
asserted the essential worth of humanity, — showed what 
a surpassing thing it is to be a man, — like that sin-con- 
victine: life of Jesus. He showed us that the human 
might be joined with the divine. He showed us that 
from lips of flesh like ours those mighty words, " I and 
my Father are one," might issue, and yet the lips not be 
burned up in uttering them ; and more than this, He 
showed us that the human soul was worth all the mys- 
terious and terrible redemption of the cross. Tlius He 
glorified human nature. And does it seem strange then 
to say that by this glorification He taught man that it 
was his true place to be humble ? Ah, if a man must 
be humbled, and is exalted by his humility, when he sees 
God, surely when he sees the possibility of himself, there 
is no truer or more exalted feeling for him than to look 
in on what he is and think it very mean and wretched by 
the side of what he might be, what his Lord has showed 
him that he was made for. Christ makes us humble by 
showing us our design. Again, let me suppose that I 
can really get close to the proud, self-suflicient master of 
the state, the shop, the farm. I get his ear in some lull of 



342 HUMILITY. 

his noisy work, and I tell him the story of a being whom 
God loves and treasures. I tell him about powers meant 
to grapple with eternal things. I describe to him a love 
that is made to love the loveliest. I open the gates of im- 
mortality and show him life opening, brightening forever 
and forever. I am able to touch the very breast of the Al- 
mighty, and lo ! the crystal window of revelation opens 
and the love of God for this wonderful being burns clear 
within. "God so loved the world ! " I tell the story of 
this being, and then to my good friend, absorbed in the 
low fret and sin and worry of this world, I say, " This is 
God's idea of you." I drop the curtain of his real life for 
a moment and let him see God's purpose I Is he not hum- 
bled ? What " Thou art the man ! " of any Nathan charg- 
ing him with sin could make his sin seem so wretched to 
him as this story of himself, written in the bright letters 
of the Saviour's Gospel, even in the red letters of the 
Saviour's blood ? He matches himself against himself and 
is ashamed. The more he thinks of what he might have 
been, the less he thinks of what he is. It strips his pride 
off from him and clothes him with humility. 

There is nothing more strange and at the same time 
more truthful about Christianity, than its combination 
of humiliaticm and exaltation for the soul of man. If 
one wants to prove that man is but a little lower than 
the angels, the son and heir of God, he must go to the 
Bible. If he wants to prove how poor and base and sa- 
tan-like the soul of man can be, still to the Bible he must 
go. If you want to find the highest ecstasy that man's 
spirit ever reached, it is the Christian saint exulting in 
his God. Do you want to hear the bitterest sorrow that 
ever wrung this human heart ? It is that same Chris- 



HUMILITY. 343 

tian saint penitent for his sin. The same faith has built 
its cathedral spires that pierced the vei'y skies with their 
triumphant hope, and it has hollowed the hermit's caves 
under the ground, as if men could not hide their sinful- 
ness too deep out of the sight of da^dight and of God. 
The exaltation of Christianity seems to get its supremest 
jubilate out of the depths from which it sprang up into 
the sky, and its humiliation is all the more profound both 
for the height from which it fell and for the height to 
which it may rise again. The world has known no psalms 
and no lamentations like the Bible's, and they are parts 
of the one same book. 

If I am speaking directly to the experience of any 
thoughtful and sensitive person here to-day, I know that 
be will bear me witness when I say that in this great 
characteristic of it Christianity is true to all the deepest 
facts of human life. Have you not learnt, did you not 
learn very early, that exaltation and abasement do not 
stand far apart in, do not come singly into, your life? 
Thoughtless and coarse natures, feeling only the grosser 
delights and the grosser sorrows, are either all delighted or 
all sorrowful, and know no mixture of emotions. Either 
they are all triumphant or entirely discouraged. But as 
you went farther and came to subtler disciplines of God, 
have you not known what it was to see your privileges 
never so clearly as in the light of your imperfections, 
and your imperfections never so clearly as in the light of 
your privileges ? Just when you saw some dear life pass 
through the gate into the immortal world, and saw what 
a bliss and triumph there must be for one to whom that 
unseen world was real and bright, just then you felt how 
little you had grasped it, how wedded you were to these 



344 HUMILITY. 

things that are mortal and seen. Just when you saw- 
some glimpse of the sweetness and beauty of giving up 
yourself for others, you found how unwilling you were to 
sacrifice yourself, how full of selfishness you were. The 
same light which showed you the heaven that you were 
made for has always showed you the rock that you were 
chained to ; as the same word of Jesus which showed the 
young nobleman the treasures in heaven brought back 
before his mind the treasures on earth from which he 
could not tear himself away. This makes the sacredness 
and awfulness of life when we come to know it, that we 
are never so near our highest as when we are most sen- 
sible of the danger of our lowest, and the danger of the 
lowest is never so real to us as when the splendor of the 
highest stands wide open. 

I think we cannot but see the beauty of a humility 
like this if it once becomes the ruling power of a changed 
man's life, this humility born of the sight of a man's pos- 
sible self. It has in it all that is good in the best self- 
respect. Nay, with reference to the whole subject of 
self-respect this seems to be true, that the only salvation 
from an admiration of our own present condition, which 
is pride, is to be found in a profound respect for the best 
possibility and plan of our being, which involves humil- 
ity. Ask yourself. You are dealing, say, with one of 
the proud, successful men of whom our land is full, — a 
man successful in some one of the low and sordid planes 
of effort in which men are forever struggling. He is 
proud of his smartness, proud of his sharp, hard, unscru- 
pulousness. Suppose you had, for instance, the mere suc- 
cessful politician of the day. The man admires himself. 
To him there is nothing in all the world conceivable so 



HUMILITY. 345 

fine and coinplete as the sort of life that he is living. 
That is his vulgar pride. Will you make that man hum- 
ble? You may hold up before him the most shining 
characters the world has ever seen. Marshal the white, 
unstained names before him and they do not abash him. 
He easily counts them his inferiors. You never can 
abash him till in some way he becomes conscious of a 
purer, honester, and nobler self. Never until by some 
shock or other his life is broken and he sees what he 
might have been, sees what he might be. In some still- 
ness of the night when a better nature is called out by 
God, and a man whom he recognizes as himself and yet 
who shames the self that lived his yesterday, stands vis- 
ible before him, — then he is humbled. In some revival 
meeting when a picture of heaven or a picture of hell, 
painted with graphic earnestness, reaches him and lets 
him see that this soul of his which he has kept truckling 
for dollars or for offices is capable of heaven and capable 
of hell, when the dignity of his responsibility is set before 
him, then he is humbled. 

Let us be sure that there is, laid up in the heart of 
God, an image and a thought of each of us, which if we 
could see it would shame and humble us. We go on our 
way, we sin and rejoice in sinning, we love low things, we 
starve our souls or we pollute them, we wade through 
mire and grovel in idleness ; but all the while there lies 
God's thought of us, before which if we saw it we must 
be ashamed. The Christian pilgrims to the Jordan are 
baptized there sometimes in a pure white robe, which 
then is laid by to be used again for the purpose of 
their burial. They arc to be wrapped in it again when 
they are dead. After all the sins and miseries and 



346 HUMILITY. 

vicissitudes of earth are over, they must come back at 
last and meet that symbol of the purity with which they 
started their new life. And often, with that robe laid up 
at home, they must stop in the midst of some foul pas- 
sage of their life, and remember how white it is, and be 
humiliated. So it is the sight of what God meant us to 
be that makes us ashamed of what we are. And it is the 
death of Christ for us, the preciousness that He saw in 
our souls making them worthy of that awful sacrifice, it 
is that which lets us see our own soul as He sees it in its 
possibility, and so lets us see it in its reality as he sees it 
too and put our pride away and be humble. 

I have spoken of the way in which Christianity sets 
a man humbly before God and humbly before himself. 
The name humility is perhaps more generally, at least as 
often, used to describe an attitude which a man takes 
before his fellow-men ; and about that I should like to 
say something next, because it seems to me that is often 
misconceived. What is it to be humble or to have a 
low estimate of ourselves before one another ? Is it any 
such unreasonable demand as this, that every man should 
really think that he is worse, wickeder, duller than every 
one of his fellows whom he meets ? The moment that 
we state such an idea we see its impossibility. It con- 
fuses all moral distinctions, and shuts our eyes to facts. 
Are we bound then only to be humble before those whom 
we do cordially recognize as wiser and better than our- 
selves ? That sets us at once to most invidious discrimi- 
nations. No, the wisest and best man is to be humbled 
before the lowest and most degraded of his brethren ; 
but yet he is not to make believe to himself that he is 
no higher and better than his poor brother, he is not to 



HUMILITY. 347 

disown the good work that God has done for him. In 
what must his humility consist, then ? In two things. 
The first will be the clear perception that it is God that 
has made him to differ from the poor ca-eature before him ; 
that except for God's help he must have been as bad as 
that. The sight of the poor wretch must make him feel 
again the tug of that rope of dependence wdiich binds 
him to God, and which is all that keeps him out of the 
pit. So in the first place he is humbled before his fel- 
low-man, because the sight of his fellow-man renews his 
humility before God. And the second thing will be this. 
The true Christian sees all the children of his Father 
worthy of that Father's love. All that he knows about 
his nature, he knows also about theirs. They, too, have 
souls, dumb, blind, it may be, but still worthy of the Fa- 
ther's love. For them, too, Christ has died. This is the 
sublime revelation of his faith about his fellows. And 
when he sees them thus, he sees the true use of these 
powei's, of all this life that God has given him. To 
serve this hidden life of all his brethren, to help it out 
into some sort of consciousness and action, this is the ob- 
ject to which he wants to dedicate his saved soul, to the 
salvation of the souls of others. And this is his hu- 
mility. Honor your own life as much as you will, only 
see in the lives of other men a value and essential dig- 
nity that makes them worthy of your giving yourself up 
to their help and culture, and then you are the humble 
man. If you believe with all your heart that there is 
nothing in you too good to be employed in the divine 
work of helping some lost child of God back to the Fa- 
ther, then you have really learnt the humility of Christ. 
Do you remember Him ? The supper was ended, and 



348 HUMILITY. 

strangel}'^ on that solemn night the disciples had fallen 
into an untimely quarrel which of them should be the 
greatest, and then the Lord Himself rose from the table 
and tied the towel round His waist, and went from one 
wondering disciple to another and washed the feet of all. 
And then He interpreted His own parable: "If I, your 
Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to 
wash one another's feet." Did Jesus compare Himself 
with each of those disciples, and own Himself the inferior 
of each? He only said by His exquisite action that there 
was something in every one of them, in serving which 
even His divinity found no inappropriate employment. 
It was the truth of His whole Incarnation wrought into a 
homely picture. And the humility of Christ's disciples, 
as He said, is one in nature with His own. The delicate 
woman for very love of Christ nursing Christ's lowest 
brethren in the most dreadful wards of the hospital: 
the brave missionary living his squalid life among the 
Indians in their wigwams ; the mother giving her life for 
the child the Lord has given her ; what is the power in 
them all but this, the certainty that every one of Christ's 
brethren is worthy of the consecration of the very best 
that Christ's disciple has to give ? Does that seem hard 
for you to believe? Have you grown weary of looking 
for any signs of promise in this dull mass of fellow-men 
and withdrawn yourself into some luxury of self-culture, 
feeling as if what you had and were was too good to be 
wasted upon such creatures as these sick and poor and 
ignorant ? You must be rescued from this proud conceit, 
not simply by counting yourself lower, but by valuing 
more highly the spiritual natures of these fellow-men. 
You must value them as He valued them, who gave His 



HUMILITY. 349 

life for them, before you can be as humble in their pres- 
ence as He was ; and that can come only by making 
yourself their servant. Only he who puts on the gar- 
ment of humility finds how worthily it clothes his life. 
Only he who dedicates himself to the spiritual service of 
his brethren, simply because his Master tells him they are 
worth it, comes to know how rich those natures of his 
brethren are, how richly they are worth the total giving 
of himself to them. 

This seems to me to be the ever-increasing joy of the 
minister's life, if one may venture for once to speak of 
his own work. A man becomes a minister because God 
says, " Go speak in the temple the words of this life." 
He begins the service of his fellow-men in pure obe- 
dience to God's command, but the joy and ever-richening 
delight of the minister's work is in finding how deep 
this human soul to which his Lord has sent him really is. 
The nature to which he ministers, as he meets its exhibi- 
tions here and there, is always amazing him with its 
spiritual capacity, is always proving itself capable and 
worthy of so much better and higher ministry than he 
can give it. So the minister of the Gospel finds his own 
humility and the delightfulness of his work ever increas- 
ing together. 

And this suggests one other point, which is the last that 
I shall speak of. I cannot but think that one of the 
truest ways in which Christianity has made humility at 
once a commoner and a nobler grace has been in the way 
in which it has furnished work for the higher powers 
of man, which used to be idle and only ponder proudly 
on themselves. Idleness standing in the midst of unat- 
tempted tasks is always proud. Work is always tending 



350 HUMILITY. 

to humility. Woi'k touches the keys of endless activity, 
opens the infinite, and stands awe-struck before the im- 
mensity of Avhat there is to do. Work brings a man 
into the good realm of facts. Work takes the dreamy 
youth who is growing proud in his closet over one or two 
sprouting powers which he has discovered in himself, and 
sets him out among the gigantic needs and the vast pro- 
cesses of the world, and makes him feel his littleness. 
Work opens the measureless fields of knowledge and skill 
that reach far out of our sight. I am sure we all know 
the fine, calm, sober humbleness of men who have really 
tried themselves against the tasks of life. It was great 
in Paul, and in Luther, and in Cromwell. It is some- 
thing that never comes into the character, never shows 
in the face of a man who has never worked. Is not this 
what you would do for a boy whom you saw getting 
proud, — set him to work ? He might be so poor of stuff 
that he would be proud of his work, poorly as he would 
do it. For the matter of that, men of poor stuff may be 
proud of anything, proud even of what they call their 
humility. But if he were really great enough to be 
humble at all, his work would bring him to humility. 
He would be brought face to face with facts. He would 
measure himself against the eternal pillars of the uni- 
verse. He would learn the blessed lesson of his own 
littleness in the way in which it is always learnt most 
blessedly, by learning the largeness uf larger things. 
And all this, which the ordinary occupations of life do 
for our ordinary powers, Christianity, with the work that 
it furnishes for our affections and our hoDes, does for the 
higher parts of us. 

It is so easy for us to go through the motions of 



HUMILITY. 351 

humility. It is — I will not say so hard — but it is so 
serious and so great a thing to be really humble. I 
have tried to show it to you as the consummate Christian 
grace ; nay, rather as the star in the zenith, where all the 
sweep of Christian graces meets. Do you not see that it 
takes a whole Christian to be wholly humble ? Christ 
came and plucked out of the depths of men's contempt 
this perfect quality and set it on the very summit of the 
hill of grace. I have tried to show you how He did it. 
He set men close to God, to their true selves, to the souls 
of their brethren, to the immensity of duty ; and He 
said to them there, what there they understood, " Be 
humble ! " 

It was as if He took a proud, fretful man out of the 
worrying life of the selfish city and set him among the 
solemn mountains, and the mountains brought to him the 
blessed peace of humility and the sense of his own insig- 
nificance. 

It seems to come to this, that Christianity is the 
relicjion of the broadest truthfulness. It does not set 
men at any work of mere resolution, saying, " Come, 
now, let us be humble." That would but multiply the 
endless specimens of useless self-mortification. But true 
Christianity puts men face to face with the humbling 
facts, the great realities, and then humility comes upon 
the soul, as darkness comes on the face of the eai'th, not 
because the earth has made up its mind to be dark, but 
because it has rolled into the great shadow. 

It is the narrowness of our life that makes us proud. 
I should think one of you merchants would be proud of 
his successful business if he saw nothing beyond it. I 
should think you men and women would be proud of your 



852 HUMILITY. 

splendid houses if you look no farther. But if you could 
onl}' see God forever present in your life, and Jesus dying 
for your soul, and your soul worth Jesns' d^'ing for, and 
the souls of your brethren precious in His sight, and the 
whole universe teeming with work for Him, then must 
come the humility of the Christian. To that humility 
let us devote ourselves, for in a humility like that alone 
is peace. 



THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 

" This I say theu,Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil tlie lusts of 
the flesh." — Galatians v. 16. 

We very often forget, when we are wondering whether 
Christianity is really a religion for all men, capable of 
meeting all kinds of characters in every kind of age, how 
far that question went towards its settlement even in the 
times of the New Testament. We forget what a great 
variety of people became subject to the influences of the 
Gospel even then. We open one epistle after another, and 
always it is a different order and kind, often a wholly dif- 
ferent race of men, to whom the new epistle is addressed. 
These Galatians, for instance, who were they ? Years ago 
a party of Gauls from the Pyrenees had wandered east- 
ward, and after many violent experiences had settled 
down here among the mountain fastnesses of Asia Minor. 
There were some Jews living among them, but mainly 
they were of another race, — a fierce, brave, generous, un- 
tamed nest of barbarians. It is strange always to light 
on a new company of men, and see how like they are to 
the men we know. Through the doorway of St. Paul's 
epistle we enter into the homes of these wild mountain- 
eers ; and when we once get over the wildness of their 
life, how clear their human nature stands before us. No 

one can read the epistle without feeling sure that St. Paul 
23 



354 THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 

liked them for the headlong and enthusiastic frankness 
which made the best part, as it made the worst part, of 
their character, and with which he had much in common. 

What sort of people were they, then? "Walk in the 
Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh." The 
lusts of the flesh ! Here they, are at work in Galatia, 
just as they are among us : the same temptations, the 
same vexatious, exacting, persecuting demands of this 
fleshly body in which we all live. And here are men 
who have so had their deeper nature stirred, their 
deeper ambition aroused, that they are trying not to ful- 
fil the lusts of the flesh. That struggle to be a self-con- 
trolling man, and not a self-indulgent brute, which is 
the glorious thing in all human history, is going on here 
in Galatia. What multitudes of strugglers there have 
been in that struggle, in what multitudes of ways! Leave 
out that struggle in its various forms from the life of man, 
and what would the life of man be worth ? Here are 
these Galatians fighting the everlasting human fight in 
their remote corner of the world, trying to be men and 
not brutes ; and here is Paul, their friend, their teacher, 
trying to tell them how. " Walk in the Spirit, and ye 
shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh." 

It is hardly possible to conceive any two human lots 
more different than that of the wild Galatian reading this 
epistle in his smoky hut, and that of us quiet Bostonians 
reading it in our quiet homes. But if our battle is the 
same as theirs, if the same lusts of the flesh are still here, 
as well as there, to be met and conquered, it is good for 
us, as well as for them, to try and see what help we can 
gather out of the words of St. Paul. 

The point that strikes us in this passage, and the point 



THE POSITIVEXESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 355 

which I Avant to make my subject of this morning, is the 
positiveness of Paul's morality. It is so wonderfully bold 
and strong. There are two ways of dealing with every 
vice that troubles us, in either ourselves or others. One 
is to set to work directly to destroy the vice ; that is the 
negative way. The other is to bring in as overwhelm- 
ingly as possible the opposite virtue, and so to crowd and 
stifle and drown out the vice ; that is the positive way. 
Now there can be no doubt about St. Paul. Here comes 
his poor Galatian fighting with his lust of the flesh. How 
shall he kill it ? St. Paul says not, " Do as few fleshly 
things as you can," setting him out on a course of repres- 
sion ; but, '' Do just as many spiritual things as you can," 
opening before him the broad gates of a life of posi- 
tive endeavor. And when we have thoroughly compre- 
hended the difference of those two methods, and seen 
how distinctly St. Paul chose one instead of the other, we 
have laid hold on one of the noblest characteristics of his 
treatment of humanity, one that he had gained most di- 
rectly from his Lord. I should despair of making any 
one see the distinction who did not know it in his own 
experience. Everywhere the negative and the positive 
methods of treatment stand over against each other, and 
men choose between them. Here is a man who is be- 
set by doubts, perhaps about the very fundamental truths 
of Christianity. He may attack all the objections in 
turn, and at last succeed in proving that Christianity is 
not false. That is negative. Or he may gather about 
him the assurance of all that his religion has done and 
sweep away all his doubts with the complete conviction 
that Christianity is true. That is positive, and that is 
better. A man has a grudge against you, inveterate and 



356 THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 

strong. You may attack his special grievance and try 
to remove it ; or you may try not to show him that you 
meant him no harm, but by laborious kindness that you 
mean him every good, and so soften his obstinacy. A 
church is full of errors and foolish practices. It is possi- 
ble to attack those follies outright, showing conclusively 
how foolish they are ; or it is possible, and it is surely 
better, to wake up the true spiritual life in that church, 
which shall itself shed those follies and cast them out, 
or at least rob them of their worst harnifulness. 

It is strange how far and wide this necessity of choos- 
ing between the positive and negative methods of treat- 
ment runs. In matters of taste, for instance, there are 
two distinct ways of trying to perfect the tasteful man. 
One is by the repression of what is in bad taste; the other 
is by the earnest fostering of what is good, — the method 
of repression and the method of stimulus. And every- 
body knows that no groat effect of human genius was 
ever yet produced except in the latter, larger way. A 
cold and hard and limited correctness, a work "faultily 
faultless," weak and petty and timid, is all that the other 
methods make. For, whether in manners or in art, that 
which appears at first as coarseness is ver3^ often the 
strength of the whole work. To repress it for its coarse- 
ness is to make the whole feeble while we make it fine. 
To keep its strength and fill its strength with fineness, 
this is the positive method of the truest taste. 

We are witnessing constantly the application of the 
same principle to the matter of reform, the breaking up 
of bad habits in an individual or in a community. All 
prohibitory measures are negative. That they have their 
use no one can doubt. That they have their limits is 



THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 357 

just as clear. He who thinks that nothing but the moral 
methods for the prevention of intemperance and crime 
can do the work is a mere theorist of the closet and 
knows very little about the actual state of human nature. 
But, on the other hand, the man who thinks that any 
strictest system of prohibition, most strictly kept in force, 
could permanently keep men from drink, or any other vice, 
knows little of human nature either. That nature is too 
active and too live to be kept right by mere negations. 
You cannot kill any one of its appetites by merely starv- 
ing it. You must give it its true food, and so only can 
you draw it off from the poison tliat it covets. Here 
comes in the absolute necessity of providing rational and 
cheap amusements for the people whom our philanthro- 
pists are trying to draw off from the tavern and the 
gambling-house. Pictures, parks, museums, libraries, 
music, a healthier and happier religion, a brighter, sun- 
nier tone to all our life, — these are the positive powers 
which must come in with every form of prohibition and 
restraint before our poorer people can be brought to live 
a sensible and sober life. Look at the lives that our rich 
people live. It is not any form of prohibition, legal or 
social, that keeps them from disgusting and degrading 
vice. It is the fulness of their lives, the warmth, glow, 
comfort, and abundance of their homes, the occupation of 
their minds, the positive and not the negative, the inter- 
est and plenty which the poor man never knows. Before 
5'ou or I dare blame him, or despise him, we must, in 
imagination, empty our lives like his, and ask what sort 
of people we should be in the squalor of his garret, and 
the comfortlessness and hopelessness of a lot like his. 
We see the same principle, the superiority of the pos- 



358 THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 

itive to the negative, constantly illustrated in matters of 
opinion. How is it that people change their opinions, 
give up what they have steadfastly believed, and come to 
believe something very different, perhaps its very oppo- 
site ? I think we all have been surprised, if we have 
thought about it, by the very small number of cases in 
which men deliberately abandon positions because those 
positions have been disproved and seem to them no longer 
tenable. And even when such cases do occur, the effect 
is apt to be not good, but bad. The man abandons his 
disproved idea, but takes no other in its stead ; until, in 
spite of their better judgment, many good men have been 
brought to feel that, rather than use the power of mere 
negation and turn the believer in an error into a believer 
in nothing, they would let their friend go on believing his 
falsehood, since it was better to believe something, how- 
ever stupidly, than to disbelieve everything, however 
shrewdly. But what then? How do men change their 
opinions? Have you not seen? Holding still their old 
belief, they come somehow into the atmosphere of a 
clearer and a richer faith. That better faith surrounds 
them, fills them, presses on them with its own convinc- 
ingness. They learn to love it, long to receive it, try to 
open their hands and hearts just enough to take it in 
and hold it along with the old doctrine which they have 
no idea of giving up. They think that they are holding 
both. They persuade themselves that they have found 
a way of reconciling the old and the new, which have 
been thought unreconcilable. Perhaps they go on think- 
ing so all their lives. But perhaps some day something 
startles them, and they awake to find that the old is 
gone, and that the new opinion has become their opinion 



THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 359 

by its own positive convincing power. There has been no 
violence in the process, nor any melancholy gap of in- 
fitlelity between. Dear friends, if you have any friend 
Vfho believes an error, and wliom you want to make be- 
lieve the truth, for his sake, for your own sake, for the 
truth's sake, I beg you deal with him positively and not 
negatively. Do not try only to disprove his error. Per- 
haps that error, because no error is wholly erroneous, is 
better for him than no faith at all. But make your truth 
live and convincing. Through every entrance force its 
life home on his life. Let him hear it in your voice, see 
it in your face, feel it in your whole life. Make it claim 
its true kinship with the truth that is lying somewhere 
in the midst of all his error. Who would go a hundred 
miles merely to make a Mohammedan disbelieve Moham- 
med ? Who would not go half round the world to make 
him believe Christ and know the richness of the Saviour? 

It seems to me that there is something so sublimely 
positive in Nature. She never kills for the mere sake of 
killing ; but every death is but one step in the vast weav- 
ino- of the web of life. She has no process of destruction 
which, as you turn it to the other side and look at it in 
what you know to be its truer light, you do not see to be 
a process of construction. She gets rid of her wastes by 
ever new plans of nutrition. This is what gives her 
such a courageous, hopeful, and enthusiastic look, and 
makes men love her as a mother and not fear her as a 
tyrant. They see by small signs, and dimly feel, this 
positiveness of her workings which it is the glory of nat- 
ural science to reveal more and more. 

And now, if we have illustrated enough, and under- 
stand our principle, let us come to St. Paul and his Gos- 



3fc'0 THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 

pel. In Him, and in all the New Testament, there is 
nothing more beautiful than the clear, open, broad way 
in which the positive culture of human character is 
adopted and employed. If you have ever really entered 
into sympathy with your New Testament, you know, you 
certainly have sometimes felt, the thing I mean. We 
can conceive of a God standing over His moral creatures, 
and whenever they did anything that was wrong, showed 
any bad temper or disposition, putting a heavy hand on 
the malignant manifestation and stifling it ; and so at 
last bringing them to a tight, narrow, timid goodness, — 
the God of repression. We conceive of such a God, and 
we know as we read the New Testament that the God of 
the New Testament is not that. We can conceive of an- 
other God who should lavish and pour upon His children 
the chances and temptations to be good, in every way 
should make them see the beauty of goodness, should 
so make life identical with goodness that every moment 
spent in wickedness should seem a waste, almost a death, 
should so open His fatherhood and make it real to them 
that the spontaneousness of the father's holiness should 
be reechoed in the child, — not the God of restraint, but 
the God whose symbols should be the sun, the light, the 
friend, the fire, everything that is stimulating, everything 
that fosters and encourages and helps. We conceive of 
such a God, and when we read in the New Testament, lo, 
that is the God whose story is written there, the God 
whose glory we see in the face of Jesus Christ. The dis- 
tinction is everywhere. Not by merely trying not to sin, 
but by entering farther and farther into the new life, in 
which, when it is completed, sin becomes impossible ; 
not by merely weeding out wickedness, but by a new and 



THE i'USITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 361 

supernatural cultivation of holiness, does the saint of the 
New Testament walk on the ever-ascencling pathway of 
growing Christliness and come at last perfectly to Christ. 
This is the true difference between law and grace ; and 
the New Testament is the book of grace. Oh, that the 
richest and livest and most personal word in all the lan- 
guage did not sound so meagre, dead, and formal. 

And this character of the New Testament must be at 
the bottom in conformity with human nature. The Bible 
and its Christianity are not in contradiction against the 
nature of the man they try to save. Let us never believe 
they are. They are at war with all his corruptions, and, 
in his own interest, though against his stubborn will, they 
are forever laboring to assert and reestablish his true 
self. And in this fundamental character of the New 
Testament, by which it is a book not of prohibitions but 
of eager inspirations, there comes out a deep harmony 
between it and the heart of man. For man's heart is 
always rebelling against repression as a continuous and 
regular thing. Man is willing to make self-sacrifices for 
a certain temporary purpose. The merchant will give up 
his home, the student shut his books, the mother leave 
her household for a time, to do some certain work. The 
world is full of self-sacrifice, of the suppression of desires, 
the forcing of natural inclinations ; but all the while 
under this crust the fire is burning ; all the time under 
this, self-sacrifice, there is a restless, hungry sense that it 
is not right, that it cannot be final ; there is a crying out 
for self-indulgence. All the time there is a great human 
sense that not suppression but expression is the true life. 
Every now and then, in the most guarded and self-sacri- 
ficing men, that restlessness breaks out, and through the 



362 THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 

strictest moral prohibitions, which have been growing 
hard and strong for a whole lifetime of obedience, the 
imprisoned spontaneity bursts forth ; and some wild, fla- 
grant act is the man's assertion that no law or practice of 
self-sacrifice can kill or has a right to kill the man's live 
self. This I see everywhere in man's history, and this 
it seems to me as if the Gospel so exactly met. It comes 
to a young man who is just becoming aware of what a 
forced and artificial and arbitrary state of things there is 
in this world where his work is just beginning. He has 
just found out that he has a heart full of passions and de- 
sires ; and he is just growing half indignant and half per- 
plexed as all the moral laws of life, all the decencies of 
society, all the proverbs and traditions of his fathers 
gather up about him and give him their good advice. 
" You will find in yourself," they say, " this passion. 
It is there simply to be sacrificed and killed." " You 
will find that appetite. It is never to be gratified." 
" You will find such and such a desire. Your duty in 
life is to watch for that desire's rising, and every time it 
shows its head to smite it and drive it back." " You are 
full of the lusts of the flesh. They are put into you that 
you may not fulfil them." He takes this programme for 
his life aiid starts out to perform it. It is not very in- 
spiring surely. Its hard negations little suit the eager de- 
sire to be doing something strong and positive which be- 
longs to his eager years. It is taking a brave young sol- 
dier who wants to be out in the very front sealing the 
enemy's ramparts, and setting him to guard the bag- 
gage in the rear. That is the low and spiritless tone of 
so much of the negative morality which rules all the way 
up from the teaching of the nursery to the doctors of 



THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 363 

moral philosophy in their college chairs. It makes all 
enthusiasm of virtue impossible, and instead of letting the 
effort to be good become, as it ought to be, the brightest, 
keenest, and most interesting search that man can under- 
take, it makes it the dull, heavy thing which we all see it 
and all feel it, — the dreary, hopeless trying not to be bad 
which drags so heavily and fails so constantly. 

The young man accepts this theory of life, this nega- 
tive theory of pure repression for a while ; but by and 
by there comes a great explosion and remonstrance. " It 
cannot be," he says. " These passions cannot have been 
given me just to be killed. These strong desires are not 
in me only to be sacrificed. Why am I living this guarded 
life of circumspection ? Here I am saying No ! to all my 
strongest appetites, and for what ? to make this poor, 
tame, colorless, half-animate conventionality of virtue 
which is worth nothing after it is made. It is not right. 
The law of life cannot be endless self-restraint, endless 
self-disappointment. I must try something freer and 
more natural. Let me let myself go. Let me give up re- 
straint and try indulgence. Let every passion have its 
way." And then what comes ? Ah, you all know : that 
wild unbridled life that seems so free and is such a slav- 
ery ; that endless cheating of one's self to think that he 
is happy in his dissipation when he knows that he is 
wretched ; that reckless flinging away of health and vital- 
ity till they are all gone, and the worn-out young man 
settles down into a middle age of enforced and dreary 
decenc)', and expects an old age of imbecility and pain. 
And yet at the back of that young man's outbreak there 
was a certain clutching at what really is a truth. He 
could not believe that self-mortification was the dreary 



864 THE positivp:ness of the divine life. 

law of life. He did not believe that tlic killing of the 
powers and appetites which He had given them was the 
education God intended for His children. And now what 
has the New Testament, what has Christianity, what has 
Christ to say to that young, hot, and rebellions soul? Any- 
thing ? Remember, his is just the soul that is running 
its career of ruin in our schools, our colleges, our stores, 
along our grandest and our meanest streets. It seems to 
me I can see Christ approach that man, that just rebell- 
ious boy. I do not hear Him use such words of utter and 
unsparing rebuke as I have many a time heard lavished 
on 3^outhful dissipation, and yet his face is sadder over 
that poor boy's wandering than father's or mother's face 
ever grew. My brother, I can hear him say, you are not 
wholly wrong. Nay, at the bottom, you are right. Self- 
mortification, self-sacrifice, is not the first or final law of 
life. You are right when you think that these appetites 
and passions were not put into you merely to be killed, 
and that the virtue which only comes by their restraint 
is a poor, colorless, and feeble thing. You are right in 
thinking that not to restrain yourself and to refrain from 
doing, but to utter yourself, to act, to do, is the purpose of 
your being in the world. Only, my brother, this is not 
the self you are to utter, these are not the acts you are 
to do. There is a part in you made to think deeply, 
made to feel nobly, made to be charitable and chivalric, 
made to Avorship, to pity, and to love. You are not ut- 
tering yourself while you keep that better self in chains 
and only let these lower passions free. Let me renew 
those nobler jDowers, and then believe with all your heart 
and might that to send out those powers into the in- 
tensest exercise is the one worthy purpose of your life. 



THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 365 

Then these passions, which you are indulging because you 
cannot believe that you were meant to give your whole 
life up to bridling them, will need no forcible bridling, and 
3^et, owning their masters in the higher powers which 
come out to act, they will be content to serve them. You 
will not fulfil your passions any longer, but the reason 
will not be that you have resumed the weary guard over 
your passions which you tried to keep of old. It will be 
that you have given yourself up so utterly to the seeking 
after holiness that these lower passions have lost their 
hold upon you. You will not so much have crushed the 
carnal as embraced the spiritual. I shall have made you 
free. You will be walking in the spirit, and so w'ill not 
fulfil the lusts of the flesh. 

Is not this Christ's method? Is not this the tone of His 
encouraging voice? "Whosoever committeth sin is the 
servant of sin," but " Ye shall know the truth, and the 
truth shall make you free." It is the positive attainment 
and not the negative surrender. It is the self indulgence 
of the hifjhest and not the self-surrender of the lowest 
that is the great end of the Gospel. And yet I know 
that there comes up to you at once very much in the 
teachings of Christ and in the whole spirit of Christianity 
which seems to contradict what I am saying. Has not 
the religion of Jesus always been called the very religion 
of self-sacrifice ? Is not self-surrender exalted into a 
virtue and crowned with glory as it never was in any 
other faith ? That certainly is true ! But we want to 
read the Gospels far more wisely than we have read them 
yet unless we see that in Christ's teaching self-sacrifice 
is always temporary and provisional, merely the clearing 
the way for the positive culture which alone is creative 



366 THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 

of those great results of spiritual life which the Lord 
loved. The right liand is to be cut off, the right eye is 
to be plucked out, some part, some organ of the body is 
to be put to death, but ib is only that the man may "• en- 
ter into life." The life, and not the death, is the object. 
And just this is the reason why self-sacrifice in Chris- 
tianity has acquired a glory that it never had before ; 
because it has looked beyond its own negations, and min- 
istered to, and caught some of the splendor of, the posi- 
tive culture that was to follow it ; as John the Baptist 
ministered to and caught some of the beauty of the 
coming Christ. Indeed, the negative discipline, the dis- 
cipline of prohibitions, is the John tlie Baptist who merely 
cries, " Make straight in the desert a highway for our 
God," and then the positive Christ comes. The negative 
decreases that tbe positive may increase. How easily 
we see the difference. Two young men restrain their pas- 
sions. You ask one of them, " Why do you deny your- 
self this dissipation ? " and his answer is, " Because it is 
wrong. I must not do it." And you respect him for 
his self-control. You ask the other and he says some- 
thing different, though the course of life to which it 
brings him is just the same. He says, "I am so busy 
about other things that I love better. I have greater 
and more beautiful work to do and cannot come down. 
It is my doing of duty that helps me to resist tempta- 
tion." When a man simply, honestly, unaffectedly, with- 
out cant or hypocrisy, by lip or life, says something of 
that sort, then there is something more than respect for 
him in our hearts, — there is a spontaneous affection and 
enthusiasm. 

The self-sacrifice of the Christian is always an echo 



THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 367 

of the self-sacrifice of Christ. It is true just in propor- 
tion as it copies that perfect pattern. The Christian's 
self-surrender is called a being " crucified to the world," 
taking its very name from the crucifixion of our Lord. 
When, then, we turn to Christ's crucifixion to get there 
the key to the character of the crucifixion of the Christian, 
we see, I am sure, what I have just been speaking of. How 
different, how utterly different that sacrifice of Calvary 
is from all the most heroic sacrifices that heroic men 
have made under the pressure of hard necessity. How 
its positive power shines out through it. It is not sim- 
ply the giving up of something, it is the laying hold of 
something too. He who suffers is evidently conquering 
fear by the present power of a confident hope, a triumph- 
ant certainty. It is because He is walking in the Spirit 
that He is able so victoriously not to fulfil the lusts of the 
flesh. It was because He clung to His Father that he 
came strong out of Gethsemane. 

I think that no one reads the story of the Saviour's 
crucifixion without feeling underneath it all a certain un- 
dertone of triumph, a latent joyousness which is never 
lost through all its horror. Here are the fearful circum- 
stances, the brutal soldiers, the cowardly governor, the 
mocking dress, the nails driven through the quivering 
hands, the groans, the taunts, the weeping women, the 
darkness, — everything to make it horrible, — and yet, 
underneath it all there runs a current of confident and 
expectant joy. What does it mean ? No doubt, in part, 
it is the accumulated sense of joy which has gathered 
there from the subsequent experience of the multitudes 
who, in all ages, have found at that cross salvation. But 
it is not all this. Even those who stood around and wit- 



368 THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 

nessed the crucifixion must have felt it. It surely was 
in the mind of that centurion. It is the clear conviction 
that we are witnessing there upon the cross, not merely 
the murder of a body, but the triumph of a soul ; not 
merely the humbling and wounding and lacerating of a 
flesh, but the exaltation, the coronation of a spirit. Dear 
friends, the New Testament talks about our being cruci- 
fied with Christ. Have you never, in your own suffering 
or in some suffering you watched, had opened to you 
strange new glimpses of the complete meaning of those 
words ? Have you never been surprised by detecting be- 
neath your sorrow that undertone of triumph, that latent 
joyousness which makes the wonder of your Lord's ? 
"Put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the Spirit," 
have you never found your cross too a lifting-up, the ever- 
lasting parable of the thorns that made a crown repeat- 
ing itself for you. 

Indeed, how through the whole life of Jesus the sub- 
ject that I am preaching to you about to-day, the posi- 
tiveness of the Divine Life, found its abundant illustration. 
He was the sinless man. Yet in Him, just as in you or 
me, were all these lusts of the flesh, all these passions 
and appetites, that make our sins. Who can be thankful 
enough for that story of the Temptation, the story of 
the Saviour in the wilderness with the Devil, and that 
other story of Gethsemane, both of which tell us so 
clearly that the same weaknesses that are in us were in 
their germs, the self same things, in Him ? And yet He 
never sinned. His sinlessness, even if He had done noth- 
ing else for our salvation, would stand out still for the 
most saving fact for man that the world ever saw. There 
is something very touching in the way in which the world 



THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 369 

of men, so full of sin and of the consciousness of sin, 
has clung about that certainty of the one sinless man. 
Whatever else they believed or disbelieved about Him, 
men could not let it go, this assurance that there has been 
once here a man like us who did not sin. And yet a large 
part of the fascination which has kept men's eyes fast- 
ened upon Him certainly comes not from the mere fact 
of His sinlessness, but from its quality. It is of just the 
kind that holds men's hearts and kindles their enthusi- 
asm. And its quality is positiveness. If Jesus had lived 
a guarded, cautious life, forever trying merely not to do 
wrong, His character might have been described in lect- 
ures on moral philosophy from a professor's chair; but 
it would never have been taken home as it has been 
taken into the world's very heart of hearts. It was be- 
cause His sinlessness was holiness that the world seized 
on it. The reason why He did not serve the Devil was 
the Godhood of which He was full. Nothing can be 
more unlike the repressive theories of virtue in their 
methods and results than the way in which Christ lived 
His positive life, full of force and salvation. 

Think back one moment from the God incarnate to the 
God revealed, from Jesus to the Father. What shall we 
say about the dear and awful life of God our Maker and 
our King ? He does no sjn. And why ? Is it a blas- 
phemy to ask the question ? Is it nut good for us to ask 
it, if in trying to answer it we have to realize the su- 
preme and awful positiveness of the life of God ? He 
does no sin because of the completeness of His infinite 
goodness, because from end to end of His unmeasured 
nature holiness and love fill completely His every ca- 
pacity and thought. 
24 



370 THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. 

And now how shall we bring all this to our own lives 
and fix it there ? Shall we not say to one another, Let us 
pray God for a positive life. Not merely a life that is 
not bad, but a good life, truly and spiritually and deeply 
good. You are tempted to steal. Do not stand over the 
object which you covet, making perpetually resolutions 
not to touch it ; but go, throw yourself into some honest, 
brave, healthy work, that shall establish for you right 
and fair relations with your fellow-men, and then the 
mean life of the thief will lose its enticement for you so 
entirely that you will wonder how you ever could have 
tolerated the thought of stealing for an hour. If you are 
tempted to skepticism, do not spend your time in try- 
ing not to disbelieve, do not study too many books of 
answers to objections. Even if they solve your doubts, 
they keep your religion in a low tone. But set yourself 
where the manliest faith is living its bravest hfe. Set 
what little faith you have to doing its best work, so it 
will grow into more. Make more of what you do believe 
than of what you do not believe. I have heard men say, 
" I believe nothing ! " " Well," I ask them, " and what is 
it that you don't believe ? " And then they specify some 
minor point, some comparative trifle. " But," I say to 
them, " do you not believe in God and in his help, and 
Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the everlasting life ? " 
"Oh, yes," the answer is, "I believe all those." And yet 
the man has been so busy thinking about what he did 
not believe that all these which he did believe have gone 
for nothing, and have grown into no earnest faithful life. 

So everywhere positives, not negatives. The way to 
get out of self-love is to love God. Do we not see what 
Paul was teaching the Galatians when he said, " Walk 



THE POSITIVENESS OF THE DIVINE LIFE. o Q 

in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the 
flesh"? 

And to help us to this positive life we have this posi- 
tive salvation, these positive things fairly revealed to us, 
God's will, Christ's love, and the eternal life. It is no 
hard master that stands over us. It is the King in His 
beauty. Before Him i-epentance and faith become but 
one perfect act. When we really get the scales off oiir 
eyes and see Him, the struggle of life will be over. We 
shall not have to leave our sins to go to Him, as if they 
were two acts. The going of the soul to Him will be 
itself the easy casting away of sin, the easy mastery of 
this world which masters us so now. May God grant it 
for us all. 



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